One man's simple, colloquial meditations on his past, his family, and his life's daily minutia are the substance of Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches. Feeling that life is passing him by, Emmett, a middle-aged medical textbook editor, decides to wake up early each day to sit by a fire in his country house and record his thoughts in a diary. "Good morning," Emmett begins, "it's January and its 4:17 a.m., and I'm going to sit here in the dark." From this vantage point, Emmett reflects stream-of-consciousness style on whatever occurs to him, no matter how mundane: his recent trip to Home Depot, how he met his wife, the habits of the family duck. Routines, such as how he makes his morning coffee in the dark or picks up his underwear with his toes, are described with childlike reverence and directness. All told, nothing much happens in A Box of Matches, which seems to be the point. Baker is more interested in the idea that for many, life is made up of such apparent trivialities, and that only by pausing to appreciate them can anyone gain any lasting satisfaction. Baker emphasizes this through the moments of understated wisdom and joy that Emmett derives from ordinary occurrences, such as the daylight through the window: "a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so." This is the philosophical equivalent of a one-joke premise, however, and there are moments when Emmett's naiveté and laundry list-like narrative wear thin. Likely understanding this, Baker has wisely kept things short. A curious, often charming novel, A Box of Matches will inspire some readers, while inspiring frustration in others. --Ross Doll


From Publishers Weekly
The science of the insignificant has always been Baker's field of study. Treading a fine line between microcosmic dazzlement and banality, he has carved out a minuscule kingdom for himself. After his recent excursion into nonfiction (the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Double Fold), he returns to fiction with a novel in the classic Baker tradition. For Emmett, a 44-year-old father and textbook editor, the predawn wintry darkness is an invitation to musings and meditations on life's events-make that nonevents. Each chapter begins virtually identically ("Good morning, it's 4:45 a.m...."), with Emmett reflecting on something as he sips coffee and warms himself by the fire: the family's pet duck, outside in the cold; a well-worn briefcase; an alternative career as a lichen expert; the idea of collecting paper towel designs. His family-two children and wife Claire-occasionally appear in his ruminations, and his love for them is palpable. But they never emerge as more than background figures, because Emmett's preoccupation is with himself; at one point, he (literally) gathers lint from his navel. Baker struggles to manufacture drama ("Last night my sleep was threatened by a toe-hole in my sock"), and his prose is evocative (a match bursting into flame becomes a "dandelion head of little sparks"). He is such an excellent writer, a master of descriptive detail with an unusual perspective on the world, that he can almost be forgiven for his tendency to focus on the mundane-almost. Emmett's life may seem rich to him, but it isn't rich enough to propel an entire novel. Even readers with a weakness for Baker's particular brand of minutiae may find themselves hoping that next time he will find a subject worthier of his prose.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Baker specializes in quirky, small-scale novels that flout most of the accepted rules of fiction while at the same time retaining an old-fashioned, reader-friendly accessibility. His books are not so much anti-novels as anti-blockbusters, intentionally pitched in a minor key. His new book is a comic monolog in 33 chapters written on a series of winter mornings in Maine. Emmett, the middle-aged narrator, lights a fire in the fireplace using just one wooden match, drinks his coffee, and jots down his thoughts before the rest of the family wakes. The novel ends when the match box is empty. Emmett writes about his wife and kids; his pet duck, Gertrude; and his doomed ant farm. He evaluates technological improvements in paper towels and toilet plungers. He tests the combustibility of various types of kitchen trash. Baker is clearly trying to recapture the wide-eyed wonder and laugh-out-loud humor of his celebrated debut, The Mezzanine, after the overly clever sex novels Vox and The Fermata. Fans will love this book, but newcomers may find it too flimsy and insubstantial to take seriously.--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Meet Emmett. At 44, he is happily married to Claire; has two kids, a cat, and a duck; and makes a living as an editor of medical textbooks, at roughly $70,000 a year. It is January, and Emmett has launched a new routine of getting up early so he can luxuriate in that precious, sleep-deprived state of postsleep--"early-morning consciousness"--embracing the quiet moments when everyone else is still asleep, the house is dark, and the mind can wander. He is determined to start a fire in the fireplace and make his coffee in the dark because, when you turn on a light, "your limbic system is hauled into the waking world, and you don't want that." In daily entries full of casual observations, tangents, and stream-of-consciousness candor, the novel slowly reveals a quietly obsessive narrator, who maintains that "what you do first thing can influence your whole day." Emmett holds forth on such things as sock holes, picking up underwear with one's toes, his fireplace, Fidel the ant (lone survivor of an ant farm), the proper way to use soap, peeing in the dark . . and other commonplaces. Readers looking for the titillation Baker provided in Vox (1992) and The Fermata (1994) will be disappointed this time. Instead, Baker offers a celebration of all things mundane, such that even the most common things take on the aura of the heroic. Benjamin Segedin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


New York Times Book Review, February 2, 2003
"Astonishing....a marvel of ship-in-a-bottle miniaturism that no one else could have written."


Review
PRAISE FOR DOUBLE FOLD

“There’s no mistaking the passion and intelligence he brings to his task or the fiery zest with which he relays his most damning anecdotes.”—Chicago Tribune

“Provocative . . . impassioned and compelling.”—The New York Times

PRAISE FOR THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY

“Delightful . . . Reading [it] is similar to listening to a series of piano etudes, each with its own theme playfully developed.”—Time

“Thoughtful and daft, sure-footed and tentative . . . pitch-perfect.”—The Wall Street Journal



Seattle Times, January 14, 2003
"[A] plaintive, goofy, loving novel....Baker has genuinely transformed the way fiction can render our experience on the page."


The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2003
"Bravura writing....feels like a walk through Big Sky Country."


Newsday, January 5, 2003
"Observation of such consistent intensity and minuteness rarely occurs in conventional fiction."


Review
PRAISE FOR DOUBLE FOLD

?There?s no mistaking the passion and intelligence he brings to his task or the fiery zest with which he relays his most damning anecdotes.??Chicago Tribune

?Provocative . . . impassioned and compelling.??The New York Times

PRAISE FOR THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY

?Delightful . . . Reading [it] is similar to listening to a series of piano etudes, each with its own theme playfully developed.??Time

?Thoughtful and daft, sure-footed and tentative . . . pitch-perfect.??The Wall Street Journal



Book Description
Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.

What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. He now returns to fiction with this lovely book, reminiscent of the early novels—Room Temperature and The Mezzanine—that established his reputation.


From the Inside Flap
Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.

What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. He now returns to fiction with this lovely book, reminiscent of the early novels—Room Temperature and The Mezzanine—that established his reputation.


From the Back Cover
PRAISE FOR DOUBLE FOLD

“There’s no mistaking the passion and intelligence he brings to his task or the fiery zest with which he relays his most damning anecdotes.”—Chicago Tribune

“Provocative . . . impassioned and compelling.”—The New York Times

PRAISE FOR THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY

“Delightful . . . Reading [it] is similar to listening to a series of piano etudes, each with its own theme playfully developed.”—Time

“Thoughtful and daft, sure-footed and tentative . . . pitch-perfect.”—The Wall Street Journal



About the Author
Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published five previous novels—The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994), and The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998)—and three works of nonfiction, U and I (1991), The Size of Thoughts (1996), and Double Fold (2001), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999 he founded the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers. He lives in Maine with his wife and two children.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

Good morning, it’s January and it’s 4:17 a.m., and I’m going to sit here
in the dark. I’m in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an
armchair pulled up to the fireplace. There isn’t much in the way of open
flame at the moment because the underlayer of balled-up newspaper and
paper-towel tubes has burned down and the wood hasn’t fully caught yet.
So what I’m looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a
monster’s sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of
fire-meat. When it’s very dark like this you lose your sense of scale.
Sometimes I think I’m steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in
a dark and remote planet. The planet’s crust is beginning to break up,
allowing an underground sea of lava to ooze out. Continents are tipping
and foundering like melting icebergs, and I must fly in on my highly
maneuverable rocket and save the colonists who are trapped there.

Last night my sleep was threatened by a toe-hole in my sock. I had known
of the hole when I put the sock on in the morning–it was a white tube
sock–but a hole seldom bothers me during the daytime. I can and do wear
socks all day that have a monstrous rear-tear through which the entire
heel projects like a dinner roll. But at night the edges of the hole
come alive. I was reading my book of Robert Service poems last night
around nine-thirty, when the hole’s edge began tickling and pestering
the skin of the two toes that projected through. I tried to retract the
toes and use them to catch some of the edge of the sock’s fabric,
pulling it over the opening like a too-small blanket that has slid off
the bed, but that didn’t work–it seldom does. I knew that later on,
after midnight, I would wake up and feel the coolness of the sheet on
those two exposed toes, which would trouble me, even though that same
coolness wouldn’t trouble me if the entire foot was exposed. I would
become wakeful as a result of the toe-hole, and I didn’t want that,
because I was starting a new regime of getting up at four in the
morning.

Fortunately last night I had an alternative. I’d brought a clean white
tube sock to bed with me to use as a mask over my eyes, in case Claire
was going to read late. I have to have darkness to go to sleep. I have
one of my grandfather’s eye masks, made of thick black silk probably in
the thirties, but it smells like my grandfather, or at least it smells
like the inside of his bedside table. The good thing about draping a
sock over your eyes is that it is temporary. The sock slips off your
head when you move, but by then you’ve gone to sleep and it has served
its purpose.

So when the hole in the sock on my foot became intolerable, I reached
down and pulled it off in a clean, strong motion and flipped it across
the room in the direction of the trash can–although I have to say there
is something almost painfully incongruous in the sight of an article of
underclothing that one has worn and warmed with one’s own body for many
days and years, lying bunched in the trash. And then onto my naked foot
I pulled the fresh sock that I’d had on my face. It felt so good: oh,
man, it felt good, really good. I moved my newly sheathed foot back into
the far region of the sheets and pulled the heavy blankets around me and
I took my hand and curved it and draped it over my eyes where the sock
had been, the way a cat does with its paw. Eventually Claire got into
bed. I heard her bedside light click on and I heard the pages of her
book shuffle, and then she twisted around so we could kiss good-night.
“You’ve got your hand over your eyes,” she said. I murmured. Then she
turned and shifted her warmly pajamaed bottom towards me and I steered
through the night with my hand on her hip, and the next thing I knew it
was four a.m. and time to get up and make a fire.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Nicholson Baker burst upon the literary scene in 1990 with The Mezzanine, a powerful meditation on the familiar that takes place during a ride on an escalator. Box of Matches reinvigorates the formula in this short, quiet tale about 44-year-old Emmett, a married father of two and a textbook editor, and his new regime of getting up at four in the morning to reflect on his life. Very little else takes place. We witness Emmett's daily ritual of striking a match and lighting a fire. We watch him bump into furniture, blind himself by turning off the lights too soon, set his sock on fire, and sit and drink his coffee. And we listen to him think -- about work, his father, what he ate last night, something funny his wife said, or how his pet duck likes to peck the cat on the rear end.

Baker's straightforward prose captures with razor-sharp precision the minutiae of daily life and the uninspired thoughts that occupy most of our time, raising them into the realm of poetry and encapsulating Emmett's life as the essence of the collective human experience. Emmett's solitude and its trappings -- the fire, the coffee, the silence -- become a sort of divine experience, and his daily reflections turn into the most devout secular prayer -- poetry without pretense. A Box of Matches offers extraordinary insight into the sovereignty of the individual human experience; this unusual novel's quiet power will strike a fire in your heart. Stephen Bloom

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks." What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett's hearth and home. Nicholson Baker's extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

SYNOPSIS

Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.

FROM THE CRITICS

Los Angeles Times

A writer must be more than ordinarily talented and skillful to be able to keep the reader interested in an account of such ordinary things. Baker is certainly talented and skillful, and in this book his fans will recognize his distinctive characteristics at work: limpid writing, a detached yet affectionate focus on the simple details of mundane life and a homey, rambling style that many readers find refreshingly unassuming, though some may find it a shade too self-conscious in its modesty. — Merle Rubin

Publishers Weekly

The science of the insignificant has always been Baker's field of study. Treading a fine line between microcosmic dazzlement and banality, he has carved out a minuscule kingdom for himself. After his recent excursion into nonfiction (the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Double Fold), he returns to fiction with a novel in the classic Baker tradition. For Emmett, a 44-year-old father and textbook editor, the predawn wintry darkness is an invitation to musings and meditations on life's events-make that nonevents. Each chapter begins virtually identically ("Good morning, it's 4:45 a.m...."), with Emmett reflecting on something as he sips coffee and warms himself by the fire: the family's pet duck, outside in the cold; a well-worn briefcase; an alternative career as a lichen expert; the idea of collecting paper towel designs. His family-two children and wife Claire-occasionally appear in his ruminations, and his love for them is palpable. But they never emerge as more than background figures, because Emmett's preoccupation is with himself; at one point, he (literally) gathers lint from his navel. Baker struggles to manufacture drama ("Last night my sleep was threatened by a toe-hole in my sock"), and his prose is evocative (a match bursting into flame becomes a "dandelion head of little sparks"). He is such an excellent writer, a master of descriptive detail with an unusual perspective on the world, that he can almost be forgiven for his tendency to focus on the mundane-almost. Emmett's life may seem rich to him, but it isn't rich enough to propel an entire novel. Even readers with a weakness for Baker's particular brand of minutiae may find themselves hoping that next time he will find a subject worthier of his prose. Agent, Melanie Jackson. Author tour. (Jan. 14) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Baker specializes in quirky, small-scale novels that flout most of the accepted rules of fiction while at the same time retaining an old-fashioned, reader-friendly accessibility. His books are not so much anti-novels as anti-blockbusters, intentionally pitched in a minor key. His new book is a comic monolog in 33 chapters written on a series of winter mornings in Maine. Emmett, the middle-aged narrator, lights a fire in the fireplace using just one wooden match, drinks his coffee, and jots down his thoughts before the rest of the family wakes. The novel ends when the match box is empty. Emmett writes about his wife and kids; his pet duck, Gertrude; and his doomed ant farm. He evaluates technological improvements in paper towels and toilet plungers. He tests the combustibility of various types of kitchen trash. Baker is clearly trying to recapture the wide-eyed wonder and laugh-out-loud humor of his celebrated debut, The Mezzanine, after the overly clever sex novels Vox and The Fermata. Fans will love this book, but newcomers may find it too flimsy and insubstantial to take seriously. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/02.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Kirkus Reviews