On the face of it, Nicholson Baker’s books are a varied bunch. His fiction ranges from the ultra close-up observations of daily life in the early novels to the hard-core sex of Fermata and Vox (a copy of which Monica Lewinsky famously gave to Bill Clinton). His non-fiction includes a tribute to John Updike, a plea for libraries not to abandon card catalogues and an attempt to prove that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty anti-Semite.
There is, though, one quality they do share — and that’s an unmistakable obsessiveness. It’s a quality definitely not lacking in Baker’s new novel either.
The narrator of The Anthologist is Paul Chowder, a middle-aged poet in crisis. His girlfriend of eight years has left him. His career, once moderately successful, has stalled. Above all, he’s supposed to be writing the introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse, but can’t get round to it.
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