Everything You Don’t Write A Novel About

The entire novel The Mezzanine is an exercise in making the ordinary extraordinary, zooming in on the tiny details of human life and transforming them into something worthy of attention. By following the main character through each miniscule moment of his day—and on the winding trains of thought they lead to—we get to know quite intimately how his mind works, and what types of phenomena attract his childlike wonder. We know he’s the type of person who will fall into deep contemplation on the train about the intricacies of spreading butter on toast, or track down the contact info of the inventor of Jiffy Pop to congratulate him on his achievement, only to give up on calling him to avoid a potentially awkward interaction. And I’ve certainly come across more than one small mechanical object or phenomenon in my daily life recently and thought, “Wow, the Mezzanine guy would have a blast figuring that out.”

At the same time, though, we know incredibly little about the “big things” in the narrator’s world—all the relationships, events, and emotional experiences that we normally think of as making up a life—until these details start to creep in near the end of the story. The more missing pieces you look for, the more you begin to notice. It’s only about ⅔ of the way through the book that we learn the narrator’s name, Howie. We spend the entirety of the novel set in a city, but we’re never told which one. After numerous mentions of both the narrator’s parents, we only learn about four pages from the end that they’re divorced. And we only ever really hear about maybe the most important person in the narrator’s life (it’s hard to know for sure—he certainly never tells us!), his partner “L.,” when she pops up in unrelated musings about sweeping or milk.

Near the novel’s close, we encounter the truly wild ride that is Howie’s imagined catalog of recurring thoughts, ordered by their frequency. Compared to the carefully reconstructed, composed trains of inquiry that make up most of the book, this is perhaps the most organic, complete picture of the narrator’s interior life that we get. As might be expected, the items a reader might recognize on this list are mostly ones that seem tiny and trivial (“shine on moving objects,” “paper-towel dispensers,” “whistling, yodeling trick”). Many of Howie’s biggest hopes and insecurities and fears, meanwhile, come as a surprise, from the life-altering decisions he’s considering (“Job, should I quit?” “Marriage, a possibility?”) to his multifaceted relationships with others (in order of frequency “Friends, don’t have any,” “Friends smarter, more capable than I am,” and “Friends are unworthy of me”) to his deep anxieties (“Intelligence, going fast,” “Fear of getting mugged again”) to, estimated to pop up about 13 times times per year, his “urge to kill.”

The result of all of this is a uniquely packaged character that is truly transparent to the reader in some ways, and yet a total enigma in others. I think there are a lot of ways you could understand a character like this—is Howie repressing some unspoken trauma? Are the tiny intricacies of staplers and milk cartons really just what’s most important to him? Is he (or maybe Baker himself, who seems to share a lot in common with the character he’s created) simply incredibly private, loath to share anything about his personal life with his anticipated audience? But I think maybe the most compelling frame through which to view the narrator is as a kind of thought experiment. The Mezzanine asks us to consider whether we truly can empathize with and relate to a character without knowing much about the conventionally “important” events of his life. Instead, to connect with the character of Howie, we’re forced to find common ground in unexpected places: the tiny mechanics and interactions of everyday humanity.