Book Review

PETER LORRE DOES A HANDSTAND

Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of ''The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and, History.'', WENDY LESSER

1990

Overview

There are nice moments in ''Room Temperature,'' thrillingly apt observations of the sort we've come to expect from [Nicholson Baker], as when the narrator refers to his collegiate obsession with grammatical correctness: ''I came home that Thanksgiving filled with evil little ordinances from Sheridan Baker and Words into Type and Strunk & White and that big orange hog-butcher-of-the-world Manual of Style.'' That phrase borrowed from Carl Sandburg not only acknowledges the ''Chicago'' of the style book's official title but also suggests something of the violence, the crudeness, that Mr. Baker is here associating with excessive vigilance in punctuation. I also loved the description of the narrator's father doing a handstand to a Stravinsky record: '' 'Don't go to the end if you don't want to,' I shouted: but even over the penultimate brasses I heard his voice, with the curious Peter Lorre tone that upside-downness imposes on the larynx, reply 'Not long now.' '' Peter Lorre is exactly right here, and his functional inappropriateness (giving us a repressed background image of Lorre sinisterly doing a handstand) is what makes the analogy so hilariously apt.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Baker, Nicholson / LESSER, WENDY / Lorre, Peter