The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

Overview

Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."--San Francisco Chronicle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307807496
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/24/2011
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	215,506
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nicholson Baker is the author of ten novels and numerous works of nonfiction, including The Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and Human Smoke. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hermann Hesse Prize, and a Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine with his wife, Margaret Brentano; both his children went to Maine public schools.

Date of Birth:

1954

Place of Birth:

Rochester, NY

Education:

B.A. in English, Haverford College, 1980

Editorial Reviews

Baker follows his surprise bestseller, Vox , with a novel once again filled with elaborate sexual fantasies. The "fermata'' of the title refers to the fold in time that narrator Arno Strine can induce; this allows him to stop the flow of events around him and proceed in his own fashion to undress unsuspecting women. The 35-year-old Strine, appropriately enough, works as a "temp'' in Boston, moving in and out of various office situations, completing his business and then disappearing. Despite his questionable ethics while "in the fold''--fondling women's breasts, going through their pocketbooks, writing erotic marginalia in the books they are browsing, stopping their cars and replacing their music cassettes with ones containing his own pornographic compositions--Strine is blithely confident that, since he means no ill will, he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite Baker's vaunted object fetishism, which in all his books registers as an unparalleled gift for description, he once again fails to find a novelistic context that would lend his art any lasting resonance. The sexual escapades here--a lonely woman's fascination with sexual toys strapped to a riding lawnmower; a laboratory investigation of the role masturbation might play in Strine's carpal tunnel problem--border on the ludicrous, however titillating. Still, many Vox readers will flock to this erudite smut even as Baker stalls in his campaign to eventually succeed Updike as America's most polished stylist. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Having raised temperatures with the long-distance sex in his best-selling Vox ( LJ 11/15/91), Baker here promises to test "how far is too far,'' notes his publicist.

Library Journal

Were not the subject of Baker's novel pornography, one would speak without hesitation of its delicious wit. On the other hand, this "is" the story of a 35-year-old man who, by snapping his fingers or by resorting to some more desperate measure (for example, turning on a rubber-band stretching machine built by a woman at MIT), can and does stop time for the mere pleasure of taking sexual advantage of the women around him. Sounds sick, doesn't it? Well, get over it and you will find yourself in one of the funniest and most inventive books you've read for a long time. For the nice thing about our hero--and this is what subverts our own values as well as his--is that he is really a rather sensitive and even tender young man. For instance, he has no intention of embarrassing the women whose lives he explores and whose bodies he undresses. He would certainly never undress a woman he did not think he could put back together so precisely that even she will not notice. And anyway, what is most delighful is not this sexual naughtiness but the guiltless pleasure the hero takes in all the sensual data of life: the way chalk rubs against the blackboard, the way a voice sounds on a dictaphone machine, the noise a ball bearing makes when shaken in a can of paint. Baker knows all this can lead to something dangerous and corrupt, but his hero is not only playful, kind (he gives away a brand-new dildo to a woman he will never see and will never know him); in his own way he is also very moral. This last point is tricky. We see that our hero refuses to take money in the periods he freezes time and he is delicately prudish ("'Panties' is a word to be avoided, I feel"). So what do we have here? Let every reader decide for themselves. All we will say here is that Baker can be very funny and that, perverse or not, he certainly knows how to write.

Stuart Whitwell