The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker--Prompt 1

Prompt: "Near the end of The Mezzanine, as his lunch hour nears its close, Howie settles in the sunlit plaza with his milk and cookies to read a little of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.He encounters the following passage:


'Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes' (120).


His response is immediate and impassioned: 'Wrong, wrong, wrong! I thought. Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!' (120).


So why is he so repelled by this passage? What insight might this reaction offer into Baker's more general aims in this novel? In some sense, might Baker's narrative method be construed as a kind of antidote to Aurelius's view?"

Response: The passage that Howie reads reminds me a lot of a book that we read in the Coming of Age Novel class--Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. In Housekeeping, Ruth and Sylvie share the opinion that life is transient, and end up living their lives as transients. What this means, as Ruth explains throughout the book, is that each individual life is insignificant, no matter how much people try to create a significance and importance for it. According to Ruth, life is by nature transient. The world is constantly changing, and that seems to be okay with her.

Howie is Ruth's polar opposite. He spends his entire book trying to convince us that all the little, supposedly insignificant things in life, are important, significant, and worth thinking about. Since the passage that Howie reads speaks of life's transience in such a matter-of-fact sort of way, Howie is immediately repelled, and even disturbed, by this take on life. Since Howie sees the importance in what seems to be absolutely everything he encounters, the idea that he himself is insignificant and worthless must be terrifying to him. He immediately suppresses this idea of transience, exclaiming (to himself) that it is simply wrong and "completely untrue!" This alone tells us a lot about Howie's character. To him, since the little things in life are so important, actual lives of people must be incredibly important and significant as well. Take, for example, the way he thinks about the man who is cleaning the escalator handle. Howie takes this job (and this person), which is not generally considered very important, and elevates it (and the man doing it) to a very high, important, desirable level. Howie is able to see how the small things in life all work together like a big machine and keep his entire world running smoothly. Howie is fascinated by the systematic way his life works. He's so interested in these small things that once he's forced to think about transience he can't deal with it, so he shuts it out.

This tells us that, in the same way that Howie is Ruth's polar opposite, Baker can be seen as Robinson's polar opposite as well. While Robinson explains and advocates the idea of transience in Housekeeping, Baker advocates stability and routine and a sort of anti-transience in his novel. While I loved Housekeeping and found it to be very successful in explaining the idea of transience, I also found The Mezzanine to be successful in explaining and promoting ideas that go completely against transience. The way that Howie tells us about recognizable things such as awkward social situations and the feeling of running out of tape or staples makes us think to ourselves, "Oh! I know exactly what he means!" It makes us feel as though we're friends with Howie. It's as if we understand him and he understands us. This way, Howie (or Baker through Howie) is able to make us understand and agree with his appreciation for small things and hatred for the idea of transience. I think Baker is absolutely successful in doing this--The Mezzanine really made me slow down as I was reading it, and space out, considering the world around me, and then return to the book and smile to myself at whatever the next tangent was that had begun.

As for whether Baker's method serves as an antidote for Aurelius's, and Robinson's, views, I feel like it does without a doubt. Especially since I've read Housekeeping, I know what it's like to be immersed in the idea of transience, and to understand the thinking behind it. It's scary to think that human life is insignificant, when we basically spend our lives trying to plan for the future and, in many cases, to do something significant. Baker's novel is somewhat comforting, because it's so easy to relate to and recognize many of his tangents, so it makes the reader feel like there are many other people out there who share their fascination with little things in life. Baker's novel makes the reader feel as though life is significant, because Baker shows us how special and important the little things are.