Nicholson Baker

There's no way around the fact that Nicholson Baker's new book, House of Holes, is, well -- it's a very bad book.

Baker himself calls it a book of raunch. And he's right. There so much sex in here that the whole thing pretty much comes undone. 

Unlike Vox, which gave some definition to all that sultry seduction, House of Holes is an adventure in excess: Baker's characters escape to a netherworld of free sex and unlimited arousal. The characters, though, mean nothing: they're little (or in some cases, big) vessels, conscripted for a ride. 

It's not that Baker entirely misses the mark: in fact, I think he's on to something here -- namely that we live in a world that's increasingly over-sexed, over-stimulated. Baker is basically acting out pornography's long march toward the mainstream, and the result is a novel that plays on every human arousal, every fetish. (And wow, there are many.)

The problem is that Baker's characters are so hollow that the sex follows suit. So, too, does the language: this is a cheap book, written with clumsy prose that are not at all reminiscent of the precision with which Baker wrote his great book, The Mezzanine. 

My hope is that, if Baker again returns to this theme, he does so less with an eye toward arousal, and more toward an eye for the meaning of it all. But then, maybe that's his point: because by the final orgy, I was done with the whole thing.