Mezzanine
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A seriously funny book.”—Salman Rushdie
“It pulverized me.”—Hernan Diaz
An elegant, refreshed edition of Nicholson Baker’s stunning and highly influential first novel, a witty and boundlessly inventive homage to the profound, neglected details of everyday working life
The Mezzanine is a novel told through one man’s ride up an escalator in the office building where he works. In the hands of Nicholson Baker, the bestselling and award-winning author of Vox and The Anthologist, this journey is transformed into a stylistically dazzling reappraisal of the objects and rituals of our lives. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one’s shoes, Baker at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. His sharp storytelling and existential humor bring clarity to the odd angles of the ordinary.
Since its first publication in 1988, this novel has become a perennial favorite of readers and writers looking to better understand our uncanny everyday, and has become a cult classic of modern literature. In less than 150 brilliant pages, The Mezzanine manages to wryly interrogate the logic of modernity, celebrate the strange reality of life in the 1980s, and express something of the profundity of human existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baker's irresistibly readable short novel presents the quirkyand often hilariousinner life of a thoroughly modern office worker. With high wit and in precisely articulated prose, the unnamed narrator examines, in minute and comically digressive detail, the little things in life that illustrate how one addresses a problem or a new idea: the plastic straw (and its annoying tendency to float), the vacuous ci vilities of office chatter, doorknobs, neckties, escalators and the laughable evolution of milk deliveryfrom those old-fashioned hefty bottles to the folding carton. Using the keenly observed odds and ends of day-to-day consciousness, Baker allows his narrator to re-create the budding perceptions of a child facing a larger mysterious world, as each event in his day conjures up memories of previous incidents. Through the elegant manipulation of time, and sharp, defining memories of childhood, the narrator dissects each item of apparent cultural flotsam with the thoroughness of a prosaic, though wacky, technical manual. The rambling ``footnotes'' alone are worth the price of this cheerfully original novel.
