INTERVIEW:Long before the advent of the blog, Nicholson Baker was focusing on the enthralling minutiae of dull, daily life. Then two "sex books" shocked his loyal readership (even though one made its way into the Oval Office), and now he's releasing a non-fiction work on the second World War, writes Louise East.
The US author Nicholson Baker is something of a niche interest. His novels regularly pop up on people's "best of" lists and feature on university modules with names such as "post-modernism, post-war". Martin Amis declared himself a fan. Stephen King not so much: Baker's novel Voxwas, King said, "a meaningless little finger-paring".
In 1998, there was a flurry of fame when subpoenaed shop receipts revealed that a young intern called Monica Lewinsky bought a Nicholson Baker book about phone sex to give to the then president (of which, more later). That unlikely frisk with notoriety aside, Baker was for many years critically acclaimed and all but unknown.
Human Smoke, a hefty non-fiction tome on the second World War, might change all that. At a time when films and books questioning America's involvement in Iraq routinely tank in the US, Baker's book, championing the ideals of pacifism, has been a surprise hit.
Its strength is its unusual structure. Unlike a traditional history, Human Smokeoffers no narrative to speak of. Instead, snippets from contemporary newspapers, letters and anecdotes accumulate to create a sinister portrait of the haphazard way wars take shape. "I wanted to break things apart, to substitute for the grand history of the war these little stories about people anchored to a particular day. The sum of these things is a three-letter word, war, but it's actually innumerable tiny moments of decision or lost opportunity."
Nicholson Baker, at 51, is tall, heavily bearded and jovial, a hyperextended Santa Claus with a startling haul of facts. At one point, he leans in to check my dictaphone is still operating, and says matter-of-factly, "Ah, the old capstans are turning", assuming, in a most unassuming manner, that the correct name for the rotating doo-dahs in a tape-recorder is common linguistic currency.
In London to promote the European publication of Human Smoke, Baker is clearly relieved at the way the publicity roundabout is turning. His book suggests that Winston Churchill, a very British hero, was far more pusillanimous and war-hungry than history suggests. Although his portrait of Franklin Roosevelt is equally damning, it's a risky theory in a country where Churchill is considered such a safe pair of hands they named an insurance company after him.
"The reviews have had their irritated moments, but the radio interviews have been friendly enough," he muses. "One of the reasons for writing a book like this is to find out where the sticking points are. What makes people really unhappy about a different way of looking at something as complicated as a war?"
The recurring criticism is that Baker, in highlighting a hunger for war in Britain, and later the US, is insinuating a kind of moral equivalence between Hitler and the Allies, something that makes him shake his head in frustration.
"Look, clearly there was some sort of genocidal impulse to the Nazi movement from the beginning, but the question is: what actions by outsiders helped to turn that fantasy into some sort of reality?"
After two years of research, Baker is certain that the Allied response - blocking Germany's food supply combined with city bombing - was "a gift to Hitler. It helped arm him in a way that we in the United States understand now. We saw what happened when two buildings were firebombed. Immediately, we had wire-tapping, suspension of civil rights, incredible brutal statements all over the press, talk of assassination, and the invasion of two countries. It was an immediate, visceral rage."
Nicholson Baker was firmly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. He protested. He marched. He wrote. At roughly the same time, he found himself the owner and unofficial curator of some 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers, cast-offs from the British Library bought by Baker and his wife for $150,000.
For a time, the newspapers sat in huge teetering stacks in a nearby warehouse. Baker had no plan for them; he just didn't want to see them dispersed or destroyed. He's a man who takes his information neat and has an addictive passion for its accumulation. Wikipedia counts him as one of its most valued contributors.
"I looked through these newspapers and realised here was a rich forest floor of enriching small, and sometimes big, surprises. I thought I'd try to approach the second World War as a contemporary bystander in the United States would. Even Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt started the day by reading the newspaper."
Human Smokeis not Baker's first non-fiction book. U and Idetailed Baker's love of John Updike's writing (prompting Martin Amis to respond with an essay titled B and I). Double Foldwas an angry investigation into the largely unpublicised destruction of old newspaper archives, in favour of microfilm. It won Baker the National Book Critics' Circle award.
But before all that, Baker was a writer of fiction - strange and funny books that, despite their author's love of classification, defy categorisation. In The Mezzanine, a man breaks a shoe lace and rides the escalator to buy a new one. In Box of Matches, a man lights a fire in the morning. In Room Temperature, a baby is nursed.
Long before blogs highlighted how compelling the quotidian could be, Baker's novels revelled in the glory of the mundane: the satisfying pleats in a drinking straw, the curious weave of a paper towel. "When I was writing The MezzanineI thought I was writing straight narrative, in that I was trying to go round the slalom course of my narrator's thoughts. It's true nobody was unhappy, in love or planning to kill somebody. There was a snapped shoelace and an errand. I felt that scale was truer to lunch hours I myself was having at that time, than a narrative of deaths or marriages."
Then came the two novels Baker now refers to, rather uncomfortably, as "my sex books": 1992's Voxand The Fermatatwo years later. The first is a transcription of two strangers having phone sex; in the second, a man discovers he can stop time and have his way with whoever he chooses. Ardent fans of his earlier books reeled.
"They were disappointed because maybe there was a boyish innocence about the narrators in those early books. People felt I was really wigging out. But I felt it was my job as a novelist to talk about all these different phases of consciousness and I didn't think I had a way to talk about sex in those earlier books."
Voxpropelled him onto the best-seller lists for the first time and gained him a whole new set of fans. When a journalist rang Baker to tell him a young intern (and phone-sex fan) had sent Bill Clinton a copy, Baker's first reaction was unalloyed pride.
"I was very flattered, I've got to say. Somebody had decided to make a present of my book . . . On the other hand, it was also kind of sordid. Clinton was a married man. But the fundamental feeling was 'Wow, she liked my book enough to give to the president'."
After this trip, Baker returns to Maine, where he lives with his wife of many years. He also intends to return to the novel he was working on when the non-fiction books took off, and work on some film scripts, but somehow it seems likely that life will intrude in some way. Baker himself sees a continuity in his choices.
"We have a craving for stories, but what a story is, is always the trick . . . It's one thing to say 'conditions in French concentration camps went from bad to worse'. That's not a story. But in describing these old women in their overalls arriving at this terrible over-crowded place, you're telling a story. You're restoring them to their rightful place."
Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker is published by Simon & Schuster, €25.40 hardback, €16.50 paperback