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. He decides to fill in the time, as he explains at the start, by telling us ‘everything I know about poetry’.
From there, Paul is as good as his word. We get close readings of several individual poets from John Dryden to Elizabeth Bishop, and scattered thoughts on dozens more. There’s a passionate lament for the ‘tragic’ disappearance of light verse and an analysis of the influence of amphetamines on the work of W. H. Auden. Even so, where the obsessiveness really takes off is in the discussions of metre and rhyme. Certainly it’s difficult to think of a novel by anyone else that might contain such ferocious and repeated attacks on the received wisdoms about iambic pentameter.
According to Paul, the first lie is that iambic pentameter is ‘pre-eminent in English poetry.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in