Maud Newton

Dec 15

Just discovered this Fermata-era interview with Nicholson Baker (and Erica Jong, et al.) and am looking forward to watching it in the lead-up to publication of his next sex novel, which is due out in August and already traumatizing Young Manhattanite.

I love The Fermata, a book about a guy who stops time to undress women, but at least a couple good friends of mine hate it and/or think it’s a crock (my pal D.E. Rasso is merely lukewarm), and it’s clear from Baker’s comments in an old interview with Laura Miller for Salon that they’re not alone.

Half the people who read [The Fermata] just hated me. So I didn’t have [the] feeling of being part of the chortling mass of humanity…. It’s bewildering to write about sex because you get this chorus of horrified people who say, “What has he done, what has happened to our little Baker who used to write about the earplug and now he’s writing these ‘grisly sex scenes,’” which was a phrase from a review. Especially in England. It’s interesting to watch reviewers. You can see them on the page thinking, “How can we really put his eye out? How can we hit him so hard that he bleeds from the spleen? I know how we can do it, we can say that it seemed as if his early books were interesting, but really they were symptomatic of a mental deviation that now is clear with The Fermata. We can say not only that The Fermata stinks, but that it invalidates all of his earlier work.” Maybe it was in part because the book sold really quite well there and was number one on the bestseller list. It seemed to cause a sort of teeth-clenched hate over there.

Side note for anyone who was in elementary school during the Clinton administration (no judgment, just sayin’): Baker’s 1992 novel Vox, “a dialogue between a man and a woman on a sex chatline, achieved notoriety when it cropped up in the Starr report in a list of gifts given by Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton.”