General & Unique Thoughts on The Mezzaine
Aakash Vasireddy | 20th Century Blog Post #1 | September 4th, 2020
Today's post: General & Unique Thoughts on The Mezzanine.
In today's post, I would like to give a couple of my overall thoughts on Nicholson Baker's 1988 The Mezzanine, as well as provide some interesting or unique parts of the novel that stood out to me as a reader.
Baker's The Mezzanine, to say the least, does not fit the overall perspective of novels in literature. Typically, a story has multiple contributing characters, a plot that includes a rising/falling action & climax, and a narrative structure that moves from one part in the timeline to the next. Howie's first perspective life narrative differs greatly. Although the story does have a small cast of supporting characters, the main perspective follows Howie: he is the star of this show. In terms of differences in plot, the base or foundation of Howie's anecdotes describes the event of simply riding up an escalator. However, through this journey up to the second floor of the Mezzanine, Howie branches off and speaks about other stories that go in completely different directions. This adds two extra layers to Howie's story that intertwine with this foundation of his expedition to the top of the escalator: first: the breaking of his shoelace and the many moments that lead up to riding the escalator; and second: the moments that remind him of his past, including his childhood, his parents, and other special experiences that influenced who he became at the time of his narrative.
One thing I found interesting as I began to get a feel for the novel's literary and narrative structure was the contrast between the realistic world and a fictional, subjective world in the eyes of the reader. On one side, you have the actual realistic elements that the story is grounded in: going up an escalator, talking to coworkers, tying shoelaces, going to a public bathroom, etc. However, with the way Howie thinks about these small, everyday moments, there seems to be a certain fictional, non-realistic element to the story. Howie takes something so minuscule and performs a deep dive into it, questioning it, interrogating it, and discovering that thing's place and role in the world. His thought process is something so unique compared to a normal thought process - accepting these small moments as a part of everyday life and moving on - so for us as readers to be seeing this and visualizing these descriptions in our heads elevates us to a kind of fictional, subjective world.
As I was writing these lines, I had a brief moment of recollection and connection with Marvel's Ant-Man story. Of course, the two stories are extremely different and follow much, much different premises but I analogized Howie's real world and his unique thought process with Ant-Man's real world and his travels to the Quantum Realm. Ant-Man goes from what we think of as real life to still the real world, but much smaller to the point of atoms, molecules, and beyond. Not a direct connection or analogy by any means but just something I thought about while writing this.
~Aakash V.
I think the way Howie thinks about minuscule things that you mention is what makes the novel so interesting and relatable at times. However, I don't consider the way Howie thinks to be fictional or non-realistic, but I see them as an ULTRA realistic perception of Howie's world from his point of view.
ReplyDeleteI think it was super interesting how you talked about how it seems like fiction. I also go this feeling, and I think it's because nobody else thinks like he does, so he describes them in such detail that nobody has ever thought of anything in this way, so it feels like fiction.
ReplyDeleteI think your descriptions of the book were accurate, he does talk a lot about things, and then uses every opportunity imaginable to transition into other things in his life, often going to the past to visit fond memories he had. I've never read any piece of work like this one, and it is interesting to me how you thought of Ant-Man while reading this, maybe the connection from The Mezzanine is similar to certain parts of many movies if we think like Howie does.
ReplyDeleteWhy didn't you write your pastiche from the point of view of Ant-Man? He would be ideally suited for that "microscopic" examination and defamiliarization of everyday things (in the first movie, for example, a bathtub is completely defamiliarized into a life-threatening hazard for our shrunken hero). Paul Rudd as Ant-Man narrating a Mezzanine-inspired narrative would be something to see!
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