The Mezzanine is a very different book. In my opinion it is a book without much of a plot but even without one the book comes off as interesting in its own way. The narration is written by Baker, so we know every last thing that is running through Howie's mind as the story progresses. At some points it made me kinda want to walk through my house and just start thinking about the small histories of everything from shoes to what's in my pantry. But on the other hand, he did talk about stuff that I couldn't care less about like his internal debates between paper vs. plastic straws.
I believe that the most important and obnoxious part of the book was the footnotes. These things added little backstories to everything in the book and more times than not I felt like I could've kept going ahead in the book without stopping to read page-long footnotes regarding his thoughts on the practicality of doorknob. But at the same time while I was reading these I was thinking "There is someone out there who finds these random topics interesting and would love to know more about Jiffy Pop." and found that hilarious. Howie is just an average joe that likes to think about everything that is going on around him and I think its pretty funny when someone puts these thoughts into writing. If I were to put all the thoughts I had while just sitting down in the lounge eating lunch I bet someone else reading them would be laughing about how much I wish I packed more cookies.
Overall I enjoyed this novel. It took the idea of having no plot and preceded to make a book on it, which I found to be very impressive. The book made me think about things in detail that I normally wouldn't like bookshelves or my worn out shoelaces. Would I recommend this book to someone else? Probably, but then I'd add a footnote telling them why they should only read it in small doses or they'll wind up feeling sorta lost.
Your point on the footnotes were a really big problem for me too. I'd think that I was on a role, and by the time I finished the 4 page footnotes, I'd have forgotten what Baker was originally talking about. On the other hand, if I was in a very quiet and peaceful mood, I found that reading Baker was extremely interesting and found myself thinking like Baker for the rest of the day. Although I did find that I generally enjoyed almost all of Bakers rumination, no matter how trivial because he managed to make it sounds very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI understand getting a little bit lost in the footnotes, but they were actually my favorite part of the book. I loved how humorous they could be and how they freed Baker/Howie to really digress from the original topic, while the main text is always forced to loop back one way or another. It's really interesting (to me, at least) to learn about the histories of these tiny pieces of technology, and I feel that the footnotes allowed for a lot more of that than the story could have had otherwise.
DeleteI both agree and disagree with your point on the footnotes at the same time. While it is true that in several instances I couldn't relate to what Baker was writing about, I feel like at the same time the footnotes are essential to the book's identity, as they are what make the book unique. Baker's explanations and attention to detail in the actual text itself could be considered adequate enough, but I feel like the addition of footnotes to major tangents give the book that extra something. This truly makes it a worthwhile read, even if not all of the footnotes are particularly interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think that footnotes as a whole are an integral part of Baker's writing style, but at the same time it does create lots of distractions to the plot. The idea that Baker just writes on whatever he feels like writing about is quite an interesting in that its a really unconventional way to write. However, at the same time there is something about it that just makes it harder to stay in the book because of the variety of tangents that Howie goes off on about totally mundane things.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the footnotes felt super unnecessary at times. Like, do I really need to read on as Howie thinks about his method of eating cookies and milk?? And sometimes I genuinely felt like it wasn't worth it; but there were also all these moments when I'd be reading a footnote and once it would end I'd return to the text, only to find that once I had gotten used to the topic in the footnote the one in the body was completely different. There's that part where he's talking about doorknobs, and he adds a footnote in the MIDDLE of the sentence, where he goes on a two page tangent about his dads ties, ending in a super sweet super personal story about a family dinner. And you read it all, and go back to the body of the text, and he's in the middle of a sentence about office doorknobs and how they're all bad now. What I'm trying to say is, I think the reason I really valued the structure of a lot of his footnotes was because, for me, they replicated the pattern of daydream-y thought really well. The way we kind of tend to let our minds wander, let them go anywhere and everywhere, and then we come back down to reality and the moment and its a totally different thing. That's my thoughts on ur cool stuff!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't disagree more with your assessment of the footnotes. It's true that there is a kind of built-in annoyance when a linear reading is interrupted like this--and we're compelled to abandon what we had been reading and follow a new thread--but once you get settled into the notes, and see them as *part* of the book and in no way supplementary, they become a perfect manifestation of the novel's digressive aesthetic--as if Baker can't be bound by the standard conventions of type on a page, and has to constantly bust out of these constraints into such bouts of "luxuriant incidentalism." And some of the book's funniest lines are buried amid the smaller text at the bottom of the page.
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