How to Make the Familiar Strange
A wide look at the close-up magic of Nicholson Baker, and how his books map the wonder of the everyday.
This morning, I go to my study with someone else’s voice in my head. This other person’s vocabulary, cadences, and literary proclivities shape my internal monologue.1 I’m thinking of Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine (1988), The Fermata (1994), and many other books, including my favourite, U & I (1991)2. Of course, the voice in my head can’t be Baker’s because most of what I’ve read was written in the voices of his characters. Still, the mythology of literature gives us the idea of a soul-like something that persists throughout all the texts of a given writer. If the reader is savvy enough, it is supposed she can detect this essence in the breath between words and in the pulsating life of each sentence. And so —
On November 14, 2024, a Thursday, I take my usual red mug of cafetière coffee and my copy of Baker’s U & I upstairs to my study, to sit at the large oval writing desk that was identified once as “a nice bit of oak” and once as “definitely not oak, no way”. I open my brown faux-Moleskine notebook (loved for its Moleskine qualities of hard cover, perfectly distanced lines, and high-quality paper; bought because faux is much cheaper than the real thing) and I begin to write: On November 14, 2024, a Thursday, I take my usual red mug...
This won’t do. I don’t have the imitator’s skill of throwing someone else’s voice onto the page. This attempt to pay homage to Baker is a poor pastiche. I consider writing my essay the way Baker wrote his book on Updike, in which he pioneered a method of study by which the biographer deliberately avoids re-reading the subject’s work, relying instead on capturing the impression it made on memory. This results not in thoughts on the work itself, but thoughts on the thoughts and associations and echoes evoked by recalling the work read long ago.
I consider doing the same here, avoiding Baker’s books all lined up by publication date on the top shelf of a bookcase, a chronology that leaves an unsightly bulge where a hardcover sits incongruously between paperbacks. But I’m already flipping the pages of my Granta edition of U & I in search of the passage where Baker sets out his approach for the book. As I flick each sheet of bound paper, I try to access that remarkable filing cabinet of memory where readers store notable lines from books in pictorial form — we can recall with an astonishing degree of accuracy whether the sentence was printed on the verso (left) or recto (right) page, how far up or down that page it occurs, and where it falls within its paragraph.
The promiscuous workings of association remind me of a line in The Fermata. It’s so perfect3 that I laughed happily the first time I read it: on page 39, recto, a third of the way down, near the start of a run-on sentence with about a dozen clauses (and one clause buried in parentheses), Baker describes a cassette-tape as “paragraph-shaped”. As I recall this now, however, I know this is a brilliant use of two words and a hyphen, but it doesn’t hit me with the same force it did on first reading. I go back to the book and read the whole thing. By the time I reach the quoted phrase, I’m surprised by it again — its magic exists in being understated, in taking a modest place amongst everything else going on in the paragraph.
This is one of the many singularities of Baker’s writing.4 He has an ability — which might just be the authorial essence found throughout his work — to view the world in extreme close-up, noting the details of its details. More than that, though, is what he does with these minutiae: he invokes pure wonder. I suddenly know what my essay will be about. I go back to the unfinished Word document in my folder labelled “Essays” and do the hesitant double-tap that opens the title for renaming, then I type: How to Make the Familiar Strange.
It’s often said that Magritte, through his art, returned the familiar to the strange. His most famous work is the image of a pipe above the text: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). It seems obvious now that what the image signifies — a pipe — is not what it truly is — pigments of paint on canvas — yet it reminds us that we keep forgetting this. A painting is not the thing it portrays, and when we speak or write, our words are something other than the things they stand in for. But is this distance between words and reality always a failure, a net loss of actuality as it’s sieved through the rough strainer of language?
The answer for Magritte and Nicholson Baker is no. “Between words and objects,” Magritte says, “one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life”. I detect a “new relation” forming between Magritte and Baker as the painter’s words link back to those of the writer: Baker discusses how language can “focus in and enlarge”, much the way Magritte here tells us that the tension between language and things can “specify characteristics of language and objects”.
There’s a quote from Henry Miller that speaks to this idea of “focusing in” to find the riches that might be found in the detritus of the everyday.5 It goes:
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
I consider examples of close attention giving rise to magnificent worlds, and I find a half-remembered line in an essay from Baker’s The Way the World Works (2012). He observes that darkening clouds overhead “had the look that a glass of rinse water gets when you’re doing a watercolour”. I find the book and look up the paragraph because I have intimations of what follows; while my memory is fallible, the page preserves the words exactly. The dark clouds are “slowly diluting black roilings which move under the white water that you made earlier when you rinsed the white paint from the brush”.
The sentence is a mere forty words, three-and-a-half lines on the page, a fleeting 6.4 seconds to read (yes, I timed it). Six seconds in which the fundamental essence of clouds I’ve seen myself are described by a person I’ve never met. Baker’s words bring me back to the atmosphere of afternoons spent with books in a deep chair, and mornings slouching to school, and evenings made dark by the clouding of the setting sun, scenes taken from a thirty-eight-year lifetime, all mentally relived in their fullness in the space of six seconds. This is Baker’s ability to “give close attention” and show us an “indescribably magnificent world”.
Baker found the perfect method for this literary microscopy in his novel The Fermata: the narrator’s power to “drop into the fold”, a timeless eternity in which the world around him is frozen. The narrator is able to pause a conversation on the cusp of turning sour, the faecal deployment partially emerged from the back-end of an overhead pigeon, a lawnmower’s grass-stained blade mid-rotation, or any other facet of our constantly animated world. As William Blake writes in Auguries of Innocence (1863):
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
I once read a transcript of a talk Baker gave on how we communicate objects in words. I go back to this transcript and sift visually through the strata of black textual lines until I find the gold I am after, where Baker describes using our attention to slow time and hyper-focus on the world’s details. “With language, we can focus in and enlarge and point and push all distractions aside and pull in metaphors if we’re in the mood ...” This is where I rediscover his evocative declaration that is a manifesto in a single sentence: “We’re trying to use words to reassemble this object’s primordial sense of strangeness.”
The writer in me is elated at the aspirational elevation in this idea; the child in me, from whom the writer springs and through whom the adult dreams, is excited by the sentence in the same way I used to thrill at finding a large hardcover book in the library that promised adventure in its pages.6 How could anyone read a sentence with the words “primordial sense of strangeness” and not detect at least a hint of that very thing?
As things become familiar, we become desensitised to their magic.7 Baker shakes off the anaesthetic by revelling in the ridiculous three-finger grip with which we cradle hot floppy pizza slices and paperback books; he reminds us of the existential “incredulousness and resignation” caused by disruptions to our routines, such as “reaching a top step but thinking there is another step there, and stamping down on the landing”; he connects this to “drawing a piece of Scotch tape from the roll” and suddenly “reaching the innermost end of the roll, so that the segment you have been pulling wafts unexpectedly free”.
There’s joy and connection to be found in having so familiar a thing described so perfectly by another person. It can buoy you through the tempestuous waters of a universe that throws us into life with no concern about whether we can swim, or if we woke up that morning without the energy to even doggy-paddle. Some might dismiss scrutinising trivia as a lesser venture than exploring the epic and the cosmic, but I see two problems with this:
the “profound” paradigm-shifting stuff is, by its nature, harder to come by than the everyday. If profundity can be found in the mundane, then we need not wait for the numinous to come to us;
we need transcendence to lift us out of the fug of normality and realign us with truths that are obscured by quotidian preoccupations with bills, with sickness, with the traffic we might avoid if we take a different road, and whether we can eat this slice of cake because we had a salad for lunch, and travel plans and not-travelling-enough regrets, and...
But what if we could find deeper meaning not by avoiding these otherwise banal things but by looking at them more closely, seeing them the way children see everything for the first time?
A friend once told me he believes we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. I think there’s something to this, so I’ve always read those who are well beyond my capabilities, in the hope that I may improve through intellectual osmosis. As I struggle to end this essay, I turn to the last pages of U & I — but writers writing about writing is an esoteric genre difficult to pull off and to interest non-writers, and while Baker succeeds, I’m not convinced I’m capable of the same. So how does Baker do it?
At the end of U & I, he gives an example of a tenuous connection between his writing and Updike’s, a frayed thread pinned to a few sentences from Baker’s first published story and stretched to reach a small section in a novel from Updike. Baker is aware that the similarities between the two are faint, but he suspects that because Baker “exists in print, Updike’s book is ... ever so slightly different”. This reversal of the direction of influence, Baker says, is “all the imaginary friendship” he needs.
This is his final act of magnification in this wonderful, slender book: to deconstruct through close examination this infinitesimal possible-connection between himself and his subject. We finish the book on what it has been about all along — not Updike nor Baker, not biographee nor biographer, but the relationship between the two subjects, the dynamic created by the interaction of two entities.
We live our lives as if the world were made up of things. We move around obstacles and pick up objects and consume items. We pay attention to the universe of nouns, but perhaps we should pay more attention to the reality of verbs. It might be that life and meaning are found in the interactions between things. An object is only worth our attention in as much as it is useful to us — be it the plate of food we eat to subdue hunger, or the tree we climb for fun, or the door that permits entrance, or the sunrise that signifies a good time to sleep or that pleases the eye and soothes the soul. Things are less important than the connections between them.
We praise innovation for the seemingly new things it brings into our lives, and we admire originality for being apparently unlike what came before. With the zeal and narrow focus of 16th century cartographers and explorers, we assume that innovation and originality will only come from places where we have not yet looked. But what if we’re already surrounded by innumerable sources of wonder, some as yet unnoticed and others simply forgotten? Rediscovery, after all, can be as exciting and as fruitful as discovery.
Nicholson Baker does more than simply notice the details. He opens them up to expose the multitudinous connections and contradictions and juxtapositions each thing takes with other things. He creates “new relations” by showing us the features of the world “generally ignored in everyday life”. Dropping into the fold is one thing, but Baker’s true superpower is returning the familiar to the strange.
I pause at my desk, look back at what I’ve typed, and think, That’s not a bad sentence to end on.
This feels like wearing a new pair of shoes in the store and performing that self-conscious walk up and down the short aisle between rows of brogues and slip-ons, to see how they feel in motion. It’s always not-quite-right because you’re paying close attention to enacting something that is naturally performed without paying any attention at all. This always results in an approximation of how you really walk. The surrogate voice for my thoughts this morning merely approximates how the other person really sounds.
U & I (Baker’s biography-not-a-biography of John Updike) was the first of his books that I read. It’s hard not to have an eternal soft spot for the love-at-first-sight a reader feels on discovering a writer you instantly connect with, an affection that grows deeper with each subsequent book of theirs that intensifies the joy their writing brings to your life.
Perfection, here, being determined by Baker’s ability to capture the definite and weighty truth of a thing in an unceremonious and economic manner.
I first used the word charms instead of singularities, but the word was too effete. I considered the word skills, but it was too technical, too devoid of the spark that Baker’s writing contains. I like the word “singularities” here: it conveys uniqueness and captures the refined density of Baker’s observations, microscopic yet packed with unfolding universes, like our own cosmos emerging from the original singularity of the Big Bang.
This quote might not actually come from Miller. It’s one of those quotations that is oft-used though never with source citation, like so many popular witticisms Oscar Wilde never actually uttered. In this instance, Henry Miller’s attachment to the quote doesn’t matter because in the solipsistic world of my mind, the words come from my wife, who wrote them down for me at the start of our relationship, perhaps because she thought I’d find them inspiring, or possibly they represented something she saw in my own writing, or maybe simply because she knew I loved Quiet Days in Clichy.
[Postscript: I was re-reading Miller’s Plexus one day and there it was — the quote, just as I had it written down. What Google hadn’t been able to locate for me I found patiently awaiting rediscovery on the slightly yellowed, much loved page of a book sitting contentedly on one of my bookshelves.
The front covers of such books have depicted the alien absurdity of dinosaurs; the hidden worlds lost to explorers but always found in my imagination; the half-section of a planet, the Titanic, an Egyptian pyramid, or an eyeball, an image defying lived experience and yet somehow intuitively intelligible. Yes, my child self would think, that’s exactly what the inner workings of the lower intestine look like.
A quirk of language expresses this propensity: the word mundane travels back to the Latin word mundus, meaning “world”. We once used mundane to refer to the secular and earthly, and now we use it to mean “dull” and “humdrum”, as if the world itself was uninteresting!