Room Temperature
Ratings3
Average rating2.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating2.7
Nicholson Baker's novel The Mezzanine turned a lunch hour into a postmodern version of The Odyssey. In Room Temperature, originally published by Grove Press in 1984, Baker takes the reader an even greater distance in the course of twenty minutes, although his narrator is obliged to be stationary, as he is giving his baby daughter her bottle. Though all in the room is still, the narrator's mind is not, and in inspired moments of mental flight, Mike's thoughts on his newfound parenthood lead him back to his own childhood and to reflections on the objects of his youth. From glass peanut butter jars to French horns, from typography to courtship, Baker mixes physics and the physical in a style that has earned him accolades throughout his career.
Reviews with the most likes.
Super amazing. Very similar in style to The Mezzanine, but centred around love and childhood memories and composing music and the sound of writing and commas – compassionate and full of wonder for what love can be compared to the more technical, everydayness of The Mezzanine (or am I misremembering it?). Baker circles between past and present across themes and connects memories and thoughts and moments in beautiful ways.
The book describes itself in the following passage from chapter 5:
“The artificial frog permanently influenced my theory of knowledge: I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest – every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness – could be at least glancingly covered; but you had to expect that a version of your past arrived at this way would exhibit, like the unhealthily pale frog, certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with ‘I was born on January 5, 1957,' and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next. The particular cell you started from colored your entire re-creation.”
