The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Just finished The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. Baker was born in 1957. If you consider the gestation period of a novel and the sluggish business practices of traditional publishers, that means that by the time one of Baker’s books lands in my lap the protagonist is usually about my age (born in 1963). The book concerns a moderately successful middle-aged poet who has had some poems published in New Yorker, who has done some teaching at a college, and who is broke and desperately trying to finish the introduction to an anthology of poetry. The novel is set in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Here are samples:

[if you’ve been to the doctor and gotten some antidepressants] you might think to yourself, Oh boy, I am one of these great depressive figures. But you’re not. Just because a doctor has scribbled a half-legible prescription on a piece of paper and given you some pills, you’re not depressed. Not the way a real poet is depressed. You don’t even come close. True poet’s depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It’s a full-body inability to function. (page 54)

[after jamming a finger] I held my hand in the air, and I kept testing my finger, wondering whether the bone in it was broken. I really didn’t want to go to a doctor and have them say, Ah-hah, we’ll X-ray it and give you a bone scan and a barium enema, just to be sure. No thank you. I have no health insurance. Death is my health insurance. (page 123)

The book flows nicely and can be read in a couple of hours continuously.