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Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist holds nothing back. From the first few pages, it’s clear that Paul Chowder is an intelligent, oddly lovable narrator with a penchant for amusing digression and a bit of writer’s block. It is also clear, however, that this is not a book for a wide audience. With virtually no plot and only a single character, The Anthologist will not appeal to a reader in search of traditional, plot-based fiction. In fact, this book may not appeal to anyone seeking traditional fiction, because it is alluring only during the narrator’s many meditations on poetry and writing while the "fiction" of the novel gets placed on pause.
Chowder is a published poet undergoing an existential crisis of faith about his literary vocation. He has put together an anthology of rhyming poetry, and now he has to finish the introduction, but he can’t write it. His block is so bad, in fact, his girlfriend has moved out. The Anthologist reads very much like a journal—like Chowder’s attempts to organize his thoughts and kick his muse into overdrive. Consequently, very little happens. Chowder sits around a lot in various places. He eats lunch with a friend or two. He helps install a neighbor’s floor. He deals with several common New England pests. Chowder tells us all these things as they happen to him, but they feel like an afterthought: unimportant, nearly irrelevant.
Of course, compared to Chowder’s meditations on poetry and editorialized histories of the poets, the plot of the novel very nearly becomes irrelevant. Chowder spends ample time laying out his argument for the importance of rhyme, his belief that rhyme is actually required for a work to be called a poem (unrhymed poems, he insists, should be called plums), and his assertion that the founding meter of all English verse is not iambic pentameter, as everyone has been taught, but rather a four-beat line. He also talks a lot about poetry in a less theoretical sense: what it has done for him, for humanity, for us. He tells about Sara Teasdale’s relationship with Vachel Lindsey, about Louise Bogan’s passionate love weekend with Ted Roethke ("rhymes with set-key"), and many other poets in between. This is where Paul Chowder shines. His exposition is readable and entertaining, thanks in large part to the humor and loving sarcasm he injects into it. He doesn’t write stream-of-consciousness, but his trains of thought do not run on rigid tracks, and that freedom adds a bit of suspense and surprise to what he writes: Who will Chowder bring up next? Where will he go? Did he really just tell us what he’d do with a ponytail, if he had one? His passion for poetry and affection for its stars infuse every word he writes, transforming the oft-maligned prose of literary analysis and criticism into something alive, something exciting, something enjoyable.
Chowder’s claim that unrhymed poems are not poems is certainly not in vogue, and some of what he says regarding meter is doubtful. Still, much of what he says is beautiful, insightful, and thought-provoking. He is particularly excellent at definitional statements. Poetry is a "controlled refinement of sobbing” and rhyming is “the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.” His thoughts on rhyming, in particular, are avant-garde: Nobody else has ever seen rhyme in a tulip’s petals or the cupping of his partner’s breast.
Considering Chowder’s book introduction, it is tempting to argue that Baker would have better served this book if he’d written it as nonfiction. However, the beauty of Chowder’s thoughts and meditations may not have shone through the objectivity and omniscience of nonfiction. It is Chowder’s enthusiasm, his editorializing, and his weaving the nonfiction into the sparse fiction of his life that captivates, not the nonfiction itself. And further, I’m still not entirely convinced everything Chowder says is fact.
I am convinced, however, that those with even the slightest interest in poetry will revel in Baker’s novel. Avid poetry lovers will be thrilled with Chowder’s mentioning obscure poems and telling anecdotes about little-known but still loved poets. For me, it felt like running into a hometown friend in a faraway country. However, for those who don’t know Bishop and Fenton and Teasdale and Poe, reading this book may be more like being alone in a foreign country, unable to understand the language.
(October 2009)
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