A Plum of a Book, "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist
Nicholson Baker
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7244-2
Simon & Schuster


This book is a plum. Nicholson Baker has written a totally amazing book that everyone should rush out and buy…immediately. I do not say these things lightly.

Let me start again, to give this book its just review. Is it possible for a book to be better than any graduate poetry seminar and still be hilarious? Yes, and the book that accomplished that is The Anthologist. It’s an unlikely combination, but when completed (to borrow a back-of-the-book blurb writer’s analogy) it’s like having witnessed a magic trick. Just how did Baker do that? Just how did he take his readers deep into the heart of the world of poetry and make it so idiosyncratic and entertaining all at the same time?

This novel begins with Paul Chowder, an unlikely hero in any case. Paul’s got two problems: One, he’s supposed to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry, and he’s plagued by writer’s block. He can’t even muster up any energy to write a flying spoon poem (despite an inch-thick folder of ideas). Paul’s second problem is his girlfriend, Roz, who’s just left him because she can’t take the non-writing any longer.

Then there is the ever daunting realization that the world is full of struggling poets, and he’s not getting any younger. He’s hanging on by a thread, living off his credit card and spending his days cleaning his office. He’s had poems published, he taught university English and quit. He’s a man of the world, but he lives in his own head most of the time.

To give just a small taste of this delicious novel, here’s his reaction to not seeing his poem in The New Yorker yet again:

And I’ll flip through the new issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it’ll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I’m a poem, I’m a poem. No, you’re not! You’re an imposter, you’re a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.

There are endless diatribes on poets, poetry, and the insider’s game of getting poetry published. There’s the battle between rhyme and free verse. There’s Paul smashing up his fingers as he slips on the stairs or cuts up bread.

It’s all mixed together like the first salad of summer, with just picked vegetables from the garden. It’s delicious and satisfying and when you are done with the book, you realize that it was actually good for you too. (Don’t tell anyone but there’s an endless amount of scholarly knowledge in there.) Yet the reason to buy this book (did I say immediately?) is that you are unlikely to find such a wonderful treasure of a novel elsewhere, a book that will perk up your reading hours, that will make you laugh and shake your head, and root for the unlikeliest of poetic heroes, Paul Chowder.

Don’t miss it.