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the complete review - fiction

The Anthologist

by
Nicholson Baker

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : has some quirky appeal, but a very mixed bag

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, but several very enthusiastic

  From the Reviews:

• "(A)fter 200 toe-tappingly fantastic pages in what is Baker’s best novel to date, the rhyming gets infectious. (...) None of which may sound like a great afternoon at the beach, summer readers. But believe me, it is; none better. You’ll laugh, you’ll howl, you might even recite." - Simon Schama, Financial Times
  
  
• "The Anthologist is so absolutely in character it's difficult not to catch a whiff of self-parody. (...) Part dotty and part devoted, the narrative voice does occasionally compel us to pay attention to the world, creating a mood of sad attentiveness which is its own reward. Furthermore, readers with no special interest in poetry will learn some sensible basic things about form." - Andrew Motion, The Guardian
  
  
• "The ineffectual protagonist is a beguiling misfit, advancing at tangents, a pair of ragged claws. The novel misfires when this voice is overridden by that of the author who makes Chowder into his own spokesman, giving him opinions on Larkin, Marinetti or Pound, either at odds with the character or outside the parameters of the novel." - Michael Schmidt, The Independent
  
  
• "Reading The Anthologist is like driving on a congested freeway: you lurch frustratingly forward a few feet -- a few sentences -- at a time. Occasionally the way ahead clears and you think, "Great, now we’re really going to get moving", which only makes the next stop-start interlude more frustrating. (...) At over 200 pages The Anthologist does not quite conform to Chowder’s dismissive view of most long poems, "a few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage". There is actually a fair amount of very tasty asparagus -- but there’s a whole lot of roughage too." - Geoff Dyer, The National
  
  
• "Nicholson Baker's deliciously offbeat comic story does for poetry what Nick Hornby's High Fidelity did for pop music: both illuminate the enriching nature of art through the obsessions that animate and console men down on their luck." - Tristan Quinn, New Statesman
  
  
• "Mr. Baker has written The Anthologist (a mild-mannered effort that could not be less like his previous book, Human Smoke) as if it were a rambling Paul Chowder monologue, a long chat emanating from the sock level of the poetry world. He slips effortlessly into the eager, friendless voice of a man who is every bit as glamorous and dynamic as his name suggests. But Paul turns out to be oddly likable, thanks not only to his funny, self-deprecating thoughts but also to his chronic struggle with language." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
  
  
• "Yet somehow Nicholson Baker has written a novel about poetry that’s actually about poetry -- and that is also startlingly perceptive and ardent, both as a work of fiction and as a representation of the kind of thinking that poetry readers do. (...) Chowder is possibly the most appealing narrator Baker has invented. (...) There are, of course, objections to be made. Baker is a beautiful writer, and a bracing reader of poetry, but his depiction of the American poetry ecosystem itself is often a little odd, and perhaps has more to do with the experience of Nicholson Baker than of Paul Chowder. (...) As reservations go, however, these are vanishingly minor, especially set beside the tremendous success that Baker manages." - David Orr, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "While Paul’s peregrinations, which recall Baker’s U and I but with poetry on the pedestal instead of Updike, are a textbook case of avoidance, they are also an earnest exploration of poetic rhythm and what it has to do with baby talk, music, crossword puzzles -- and his longing for Roz." - The New Yorker
  
  
• "The last 30 pages do change Chowder's life, in mildly happy, and mildly implausible, ways, as if to appease readers who believe novels need plots. But if you want plot, you should read somebody else. If you want supple, lightly ironized, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny prose from a hapless fictional poet, a gentle satire of books about how to read poetry, and a short, sneaky introduction to poetry that conveys real information despite its fictional disguise, this book will be a delight." - Stephen Burt, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "This book is indeed a frame -- a beautifully constructed frame that makes art of a few difficult months of one man's life. (...) The whole book is multisensory, lavishly onomatopoeic as well as olfactory (.....) The Anthologist purports to be a novel but reads more like a monologue; it has some aspects of the diary and the memoir, but also the riches we'd expect of a critical book." - Peggy Hughes, Scotland on Sunday
  
  
• "It is all quite agreeable, but not very compelling. There is a narrative line, but it is so faint that you often lose sight of it. It's pleasant to read a few pages, but you think you could read them in any order, and it wouldn't matter much." - Allan Massie, The Scotsman
  
  
• "As the material for a novel, this might all sound a bit whimsical -- but it’s far too heartfelt to be that. More importantly, while there’s no denying that one reason for reading The Anthologist is to find out lots of interesting stuff about poetry, it does remain a novel. As obsessives go, Paul proves surprisingly good company -- but this is partly because, in Baker’s cunning hands, he can’t prevent his non-reading life from leaking out round the sides in ways that are simultaneously funny and painful." - James Walton, The Spectator
  
  
• "Paul Chowder, who narrates Nicholson Baker’s new novel, is supposed to be a grown man but is painfully reminiscent of Nory, the nine-year-old heroine of an earlier book. From the first paragraph, he’s ingratiating and cutesy, ­nudging us with facetious asides, witless irrelevancies, saccharine confidences, simplistic generalisations and forgettable chitchat. (...) Baker’s book is parasitic on the work of better writers. It makes more sense to abandon it and go off in search of the poems that exist outside it." - Tom Deveson, Sunday Times
  
  
• "The book is experimental because the stuff that isn’t about the introduction and the girlfriend is just as exciting. You might have to be especially interested in music and prosody to find it all that exciting, but if you are, you will." - Tom Payne, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Baker has created in The Anthologist a poetry workshop in fictional form. It’s instructive, quirky, and highly entertaining. Its main point is that literature needs the second-raters as the measure by which the top-raters can be measured." - John Sutherland, The Times
  
  
• "The novel certainly offers a practical lesson in how poetry can be spoken and heard. (...) His broader thoughts are poised somewhere between half-assed and half-earned, demonstrating the amateur accessibility that Nicholson himself showed in U & I (.....) The novel is a testament to -- indeed an anthology of -- moments when poetry and life touch against each other. (...) His is a rare example of affectionate art, of brilliant writing that manages to collect and display the odds and ends of existence in a way that makes the reader like it and him." - Stephen Abell, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Having forgotten how poetry works, he obsesses on its formal qualities. In true Baker style, pages of analysis ensue, replete with charts and even musical annotations. Readers are likely to think either, "You know, I kind of like this guy" or "What a chowderhead."" - David Kirby, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Anthologist opens:

     Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know.

Paul Chowder's introduction locates rhyming poetry in its historical context and reawakens our sense of the fructifying limitlessness of traditional forms.

Why ? Why do we need things to rhyme so much ?

He's a pretty smooth dude. He used to be the poetry editor of The New Republic. Rejected some things of mine and more power to him.

     At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but no recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 August 2009

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Links:

• Simon & Schuster publicity page
• Interview in the New Statesman
• Profile in New York

• Boston Globe
• The Guardian
• How to furnish a room
• The Independent
• Literary Kicks
• MostlyFiction Book Reviews
• The National
• New Statesman
• The New Yorker
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Seattle Times
• The Washington Post

• Nicholson Baker Fan Page
• Interview at identity theory

• Checkpoint
• The Everlasting Story of Nory

• See the Index of Contemporary American fiction at the complete review
• See Index of Poetry
• See Index of Anthologies

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About the Author:

       American author Nicholson Baker was born in 1957. He attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College and has written a number of novels (including Vox (1992) and The Fermata (1994)) and some non-fiction (including the account of his obsession with author John Updike, U and I (1991)).

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