The Anthologist
Hello, Sarah here, and I’m going to try to tell you about Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. Not all about, because there are a lot of reviews already out there saying that you should read it, and they’re right. But about a few of the things I’ve remarked on while reading it that the reviews I’ve read haven’t remarked on. A nice homonym, ‘remark.’ You can make a remark or remark on something, and I can then remark on your remark. And if that remark gets repeated with a few distortions, we could get all 1990s and say it was [re]marked.
The Anthologist is narrated in a manner somewhat like this by Paul Chowder, who’s procrastinating writing the introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry. So the novel is his act of procrastination, and is itself an anthology of what pops into his head. “All I’ve met is a part of me,” or maybe it’s the other way around. Tennyson said that; do kids read Tennyson anymore? He’s pithier for yearbook quotes than Atlas Shrugged or Madonna, and twenty years later you won’t have to be embarrassed by the Tweet’s-worth of sentiment next to your picture—just by the picture itself.
But, The Anthologist. Nicholson Baker Paul Chowder must have Internet habits a lot like mine because the pacing of subject changes and interjection of random ideas is about right for when I’m working and checking Tumblr or Facebook (not so much anymore) or The Times or The Awl. Did you know that in the 10s six of the seven careers projected to create the most new jobs in the U.S. are low-skill, low-wage? Also: China. There are many of them and their ancient culture will help them take over, or maybe not. Only occasionally, so far, do Baker’s Paul’s digressions feel at all constructed. (Speaking of digressions, did you know you could buy software that lets you save videos from YouTube to your desktop? I assume this means Flash-authoring software, but Baker Paul is cagey about that).
A good portion of the novel covers Paul’s theory on rhythm and scansion, and other comments such as how poetry isn’t subject to the same categories of fiction/nonfiction as prose which may sound dry but isn’t at all, the way he tells it:
Coleridge says that Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man. Did it really do that? John Fogerty says the old man is down the road. Is he?
The entire book is quotable:
[The inchworm] looked comfortably full of metaphorphosive juices—full of the short happiness of being alive. I touched it, and it began doubling itself up and then greenly casting itself forward again.
Phrases like “the short happiness of being alive” would die in the wrong context. Baker’s prose is simple and elegant and fluid, not self-consciously simple like Hemingway’s or Didion’s (both favorites of mine, lest you think otherwise); and as in Didion’s writing, sentence structure enables insights. As does diction. Things like saying “greenly casting” instead of “the inchworm was green” let you make all kinds of asides—we’re with you after that. The keenness of the asides keeps Baker’s forays into poetry aloft. And back, and forth. Nothing is beneath his notice, not even USB cables.
The Anthologist is about awareness—an upper middle class, perhaps excessively introspective poet’s awareness, but all the more compendious for that; and it’s about How We Are Aware Now; the overarching and only slightly allayed sense of concern; the amount of information available to us effortlessly. We’re all anthologists. The difficult thing is reserving attention for our own sustained endeavors.
