The Fermata, Nicholson Baker

Since reading The Fermata, I've been thinking a lot about raunchy books. I suppose that, before Nicholson Baker's opus about a man who uses his time-stopping powers to take women's clothes off and jerk off prodigiously, the raunchiest books I'd ever read were the Piers Anthony stuff I dug in junior high or a few sections of Mailer's Harlot's Ghost. Or maybe Lolita, but Lolita's different, and in an interesting way: Nabokov's work deals with a very transgressive idea, approaching it quite obliquely. Baker, on the other hand, talks about something substantially less objectionable (sure, no one's going to argue that stopping time and groping women would be morally defensible, but I think the majority would agree it's way better than adopting and serially molesting a young girl) and does it very explicitly. Baker's protagonist, Arno Strine, does a bunch of things which are mildly- to fairly- distasteful, and describes them in exacting, sweaty detail; Nabokov listed his monstrosities without using a single obscenity.

This contrast is interesting, and it's worthwhile to try to figure out why it exists (my guess is that Nabokov went first, and did it so goddamned brilliantly that the bar was set too high for anyone to try the same thing; alternately, I suppose Baker wanted us to be able to like Strine in the end, while I assume Nabokov's whole point was that we would slowly realize that we were sympathizing with a monster), but that's beyond the scope of this page; we're just here to talk about whether the book was any good.

So was it? Yep. The Fermata is a lot of fun. The time-stopping Arno Strine is engaging and repellant at the same time, working on a strange mixture of perversion and whimsy (although he does slip over into the annoying column whenever his anus comes up, which is fairly frequently); particularly fun are the various and ever-changing methods Strine uses to trigger his time-stops. The prose helps; Baker reads sort of like a toned-down David Foster Wallace.

This book isn't for everybody. At the very least, you'll need dual tolerances for science fiction (given its unreliable narrator and novel-within-a-novel metafiction elements, Fermata probably fits more into the literary fiction box than SF, but you have to be ready to run with the concept of a guy stopping time) and for slightly-and-probably-intentionally-overdone erotica. But if you're down with those two elements, you'll enjoy the book, even if you fervently hope that none of your co-workers ask you what it is you're reading.
--Keith Pille



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