Newspaper Article

Among School Children

Crowley, John

1998

Overview

Many novelists have among their works a tour de force -- a startling or unlikely achievement or a brilliant triumph against self-imposed odds or an immodest display of skill for its own sake. Nicholson Baker is a writer of tours de force who has yet to write a novel. Perhaps that's too stringent or exclusive a judgment, considering the present baffling and baffled state of ambitious novel-writing, but certainly every definition of the tour de force fits Vox (book-length phone sex) or Mezzanine (endless office trivialities) or The Fermata (goofy porno fantasy) and his others, not because of their subjects or modes but because of the exhilarating success they achieve. His new book is one more. The Everlasting Story of Nory is a few months in the life of Eleanor, or Nory, who would be in the fourth grade if she were in America but who is spending a year with her parents and baby brother in England and going to a blazer-and-rep-tie cathedral school. The book is written in the third person, but the language and the ethos are pervasively those of a smart (but not prodigious), strong (but not fearless), and imaginative (but not poetic) girl of 10, who has many interests and is apprehensive about bad dreams: Nory's language is a mass of wonderful malapropisms, often ones that suggest mistaken but not so unlikely shadow meanings that the phrases will probably retain throughout Nory's everlasting life: a crude awakening, kitten caboodle, bump on a rug, par none, totally made up from scrap. But it's not just the language that Baker reproduces -- or recreates -- but the coarse weave of childhood thought, the leaps of memory, apprehension and association. Only lengthy quotation would do it justice.

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• Subject: Baker, Nicholson / Nicholson Baker / Novels