Nicholson Baker has gotten a lot of attention with his latest book "House of Holes," with a host of highfalutin sources extolling its both its literary merit and its over-the-top eroticism. The New York Times, for example, calls it a “glorious filthfest,” and "as funny as it is filthy."As someone with an interest both in erotica/pornography (I write the stuff) and works of high literary aspiration (um, I read the stuff), I naturally felt I had to check this dude out.I tried the Kindle sample-snippet of "House of Holes" first, but it didn't really grab me. It felt too easy, too facile and light-weight. As I read, a voice in the back of my head was muttering "yeah, yeah, some whacky surrealism, some explicit sex, more whacky surrealism, rinse and repeat. Ho-hum." Like the philistine looking at a Jackson Pollock, I kept thinking, "Whatsa big deal? *I* could do this."Whether or not that leapt-to assessment of "House of Holes" was fair, I decided to try out "The Fermata," an earlier book of Baker's. The major draw of this novel for me was the delightfully sexy premise: A man has the ability to stop time, and uses his power to undress and ogle women. Yes, it's an old idea, but I thought it was potentially a terrific jumping-off point.I was not disappointed. The main charm of the book is in the character of the protagonist. He's an immensely gentle, thoughtful man who takes great pains to avoid doing any harm or causing any distress with his magical power. The women he undresses, he meticulously re-dresses before restarting time, careful to leave behind no trace of his trespasses on their bodies. Furthermore, he's no mere seeker after nubile perfection. Instead he takes a boundless delight in the variations of women's bodies; "the average woman, the unexceptionable woman, the interestingly ugly woman…" In his delight, he waxes poetic for pages at a time over one woman's pubic hair ("to think I could have died and not seen this…"), the breasts of a host of others ("perfect in their indispensable imperfection"), and even such minutia as "the beautifully defined H shapes" at the backs of another woman's knees. He is intoxicated, transported and inspired by the physical beauty he unveils, by the secrets that women's uncovered bodies whisper to him.Baker has said that he's a great admirer of John Updike, and it shows. The narrative is often intermixed with Updike-like musings on such peripheral topics as contact lenses versus eyeglasses or the experience of transcribing dictaphone tapes. But always (even more so than in Updike), these meditations are inspired and filtered through the protagonist's all-pervasive sexuality.Speaking of sex… Yes, there's rather a lot of it. But since this is "literary pornography" (a term that in combination with Nicholson Baker's name returns 206 hits on Google), it's not the wall-to-wall sex you'll find in straightforward porn [cough[like mine]cough]. But the hot parts are definitely hot, and cover a generous range of kinks and variations.Something of a standard line of description in reviews of erotica is "but there's a good story too." I'm spared from having to parrot that apologetic-sounding phrase here, because really there is no "story" to "The Fermata." There's no plot arc or character arc to speak of. Rather, it's more of a portrait -- a deftly and artistically rendered portrait of a delightful character and his magical gift.
The basic idea here is awesome. Protagonist finds a way to stop time, and is able, during the time-stops, to move around and do as he pleases as the rest of the world remains 'frozen.' Kind of an infantile idea gone literary, like the 'everybody but me is a robot' thing which I think Vonnegut took up. Here the protagonist doesn't want to change the world, get rich, or screw with peoples' minds-- he just wants to see women naked. It sounds pretty damn childish when it's stated as bluntly as that, and yes it could sound offensive. But it's not. It's just the opposite because, simply, the protagonist loves women. Not just hot chicks or girls the protagonist has a thing for, but the fair sex in its totallity. The writing is infused with an intense, honest, and well-considered reverence for women and all things female, from an unapolagetically male point of view. What carried me through to the end of this hugely overgrown erotic novella was the outstanding writing. Sure, 'The Fermata' is literally navel-gazing and masturbatory, but the protagonist makes no bones about his 'gift,' he is keenly, hilariously self-aware of how lucky he is and how essentially innocent are his desires. This is reading as pleasure, one of the many minor subtexts of the book. Nicholson Baker never never stops offering the sharpest and most utterly original word-craft even when he's essentially given up on the plot itself. The tiniest tinge of pretention would've sunk this book and so it's a credit to the author that 'The Fermata' stays staunchly afloat. Baker's writing is what makes 'The Fermata' such a good read. Finally here is one of among several paragraphs and-or sections I found outstanding and which would pretty much define the entirety of 'The Fermata': "The Fermata allows me ... to take in a paricular lived second of one woman's life, the incremental outcome of so many decisions and misfortunes and delights and griefs, while she is in the very midst of bringing it into being. The ability to investigate all aspects of her careless aliveness, where her clothes stretch, her body's textures, her expression, her smells, the way she happens to be standing or moving ... the daily fluidity of her life whose specific complex of qualities would have otherwise gone unseen by anyone-- unphotographed, uncelebrated, unvalued, unloved. It is their randomness and, often their very lack of overt sexiness that makes these instants so erotically precious."
What do You think about The Fermata (2004)?
The Fermata doesn’t simply posit the question what would you do if you could stop time? It assumes, quite rightly, that everyone would undress and violate their fellow citizens within about four seconds, so asks instead how would you use this erotic licence to engineer love in the moving world? Such is the problem of our hapless obsessive narrator who, like the hero in The Mezzanine, observes a pathological attention-to-detail to the minutiae of his warped inventions. Since constructing his time-stopping device through a series of implausible homemade contraptions, he has practiced a strict moral code: no stealing and no sexual deviation observable to his victims in the moving world. A laudable practice that he doesn’t always observe, especially with those he has reciprocal sex with.Sadly, I came to identify with the narrator at points—not in his planting-porno-on-the-beach or his whipping-himself-into masturbatory-frenzies side—but in his attempts to manipulate fate while remaining invisible to the victims of his infatuation. In my case, I became infatuated with a woman in a blue-button hat who caught the 8am train into Edinburgh. After some harmless staring I detected her reading Treasure Island and tried dropping feeble hints that I too was reader, and that although we only shared a train trip and interest in books, we one day might unite in supernovas of love and set the universe on fire. Or, failing that, do it quick and nasty in the driver’s cabin. My technique was to carry a book underarm at all times, as though the book might magnetise her toward me. Feeble.This novel is awesome. Exemplary verbal gymnastics, hilarious neologisms (or neolojisms) and crazy Flann O’Brien-style humour. And lashes of gratuitous pornographic content. Perfect.
—MJ Nicholls
A version of the bullock-powered mill was prominently used in India as much as six-seven decades ago. Tied to a central hub that grinds grain or extracts oil, the bullock traverses a circular course. This path never varies nor does it move one inch away from the center. I took this example as it is very close to The Fermata in its execution. The center of this literary mill is sexuality of the voyeuristic kind and there is hardly anything else in the book ! A thirty year old man who is by nature an introvert has the amazing capacity to stop time dead on its tracks. And what does he do when the entire universe is stopped ? Does he steal ? Does he spy ? Nope, he goes around undressing women and gaze for his heart's ( & his organ's) fill of naked bodies ! I found this extremely odd but after a few chapters I realized that the whole point was to cram in the maximum of sexual fetishes. The erotic parts are elaborately written with the same level of detail as any other piece of erotica. This more or less sums up the plot part of the book.Now I get to the reason as to why I give this book two stars. Nicholson Baker's writing is top notch. A simple act of lying in the sun after removing your glasses is made into a shining paragraph that left me wanting to re-read it again. Baker takes the most unassuming of things : reading a book, washing up after wild sex or even writing a sentence on a piece of tissue and transforms them into pieces of exemplary writing. On taking a look at the entire picture of the book, I feel that it was erotic fiction with gems of acture observation and brilliant writing scattered throughout !
—Arun Divakar
it's kind of like if Douglas R. Hofstadter started writing for hustler magazine. only, beneath the pure and gleeful pornography and meditations on time and consciousness, there's a simple and affecting love story about two lonely people. it's actually a very sweet book.some of my favorite parts (there are a million):While Joyce was gone I stared at the flower in the bud vase and felt up the table under the tablecloth to discover what sort of surface it had. It had a rough surface. I didn't think; I just waited. Our salads came. and, later:I showed her the negative black paths our bodies left behind in the constellations of hanging, glinting raindrops.
—Ben Loory
