The charm of the commonplace

Where other contemporary American novelists, mandarin or popular, like to write about war in South-east Asia, corruption in the boardroom, organised crime and the alienated condition of the human soul, Nicholson Baker prefers to tackle the truly important issues of our time: how to lift a pair of underpants with your toes, how to make a bar of soap revolve in your hand by strategic squeezing, why it is perfectly permissible, indeed thoughtful, for gentlemen to relieve their bladders in the seated position traditionally favoured by ladies, the demonstrable superiority of the English spelling ‘grey’ to the standard American ‘gray’.

For readers who discovered the uniquely beguiling qualities of Baker’s project in the late Eighties, when he published his mock-heroic tale of an office worker’s lunch hour, The Mezzanine, his latest novel represents a welcome return to terrain at once comfortingly familiar and bracingly fresh.

In recent books, Baker has digressed into the realms of sexual obsession (The Fermata), childhood as seen from inside (The Everlasting Story of Nory) and, in non- fiction, the iniquities of librarians (Double Fold); A Box of Matches sees him back on the quotidian front, following the traditional Socratic mission of examining daily life with a meticulousness that would have made Socrates seem sluggish.

Stubbornly devoid of any plot as Messrs Grisham or King would recognise the term, the novel offers, instead, a gradually unfolding portrait of a pleasant, middle-class American family. Our narrator-hero, whose domestic circumstances are suspiciously reminiscent of Baker’s own, is Emmett, a 44-year-old editor of medical textbooks, who shares his inconspicuous life with his wife Claire, 14-year-old daughter Phoebe, eight-year-old son Henry and a recently adopted duck called Greta, ‘who has enriched our lives considerably’. (There is also a male cat, but he is somewhat neglected.)