Monster Of Exactitude

An obsession with time--its amplitude and elasticity, its depredations, its inexorable passage--has driven all Nicholson Baker's work. His first novel, "The Mezzanine" (1988), opens up the squirreled-away wonders of an ordinary lunch hour. In the antically pornographic "The Fermata" (1994), the hero can stop time and disport himself in a private statue-garden of women (he even puts "nipple nooses" on Anne Rice). The nonfiction "Double Fold" (2001) argued passionately for the preservation of endangered old books and newspapers. But his new novel--novella, really--"A Box of Matches," outs the theme that's dared not speak its name: mortality pure and simple. It's his most affecting and satisfying novel yet.

For Baker, at least, this is a rigorously classical work: its structural and thematic unity in plain view, the whimsy and razzle-dazzle toned down by melancholy. The "plot" harks back to the minimalism of "The Mezzanine": Emmett, a medical- textbook editor, gets up before daylight on a series of mornings and lights the fire in his 18th-century house; the book's over when the matches run out. He records such everyday ephemera as the sound of a dropped bar of soap hitting the bathtub, the hooking of coat hangers on two fingers at the dry cleaner's, the rooting-out of navel lint. (In his still-dark house, this is not, literally, navel-gazing.) Yet he regrets all that his busy consciousness hasn't time to register: "Passing me by, passing me by. Life is." In the shower, he sings "Eight Days a Week"; even a thousand wouldn't be enough.

The frequency with which Emmett mentions funerals, corpses and autopsies is astonishing for a Baker character; so is his habit of lulling himself to sleep with thoughts of suicide. (In one fantasy, he devises a "self-filling grave": climb in, shoot yourself and a system of pulleys and weights brings down the earth that's been heaped on plywood.) "Emmett" is an archaic word for "ant," and the novel's second most memorable character is the tough, tiny Fidel, the last survivor in an ant farm, who buries his comrades, then dies himself, "as every ant will."

If both the title and Emmett's riff on how "a succession of days is like a box of new envelopes" remind you of Forrest Gump's "box of chocolates" aria, it's not a lapse of taste or vigilance on Baker's part. He presents Emmett, for all his powers of micro-observation, as a world-class naif. Emmett talks like Holden Caulfield ("I'm not kidding"), reads Robert Service and is so forgetful his wife has to pay the household bills. But he knows what a freak he is--"a monster of exactitude"--and lovingly castigates his own game of trying to make the total come out even when pumping gas: "When I came up on fifteen I said to myself, 'Go for sixteen, you sick bastard'." He accepts his obsessiveness as he accepts the "almost parsonly" mouth in his "plump, weak face." He regards himself as one more creature of time, to be observed, cherished and finally lost. However--and here's his and the novel's glory--he's also his own Recording Angel, a flame of consciousness in the dark. "That is part of why I like looking at these burning logs: they seem like years of life to me," he tells us. "All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn."