Adventures in the Everyday

By Lev Grossman

The premise of Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches (Random House; 178 pages) is so wondrously slight, it's hardly there at all. Emmett, 44, is an editor of medical textbooks who lives in an old farmhouse in the country with his wife and two children. Every morning at 4 or 5, Emmett goes downstairs, lights a fire and sits by it, "the sole node of wakefulness at the heart of the sleeping world." He thinks about small, inconsequential things: the furious way his pet duck pecks at a frozen log "as if she were Teletyping a wire service story on it" or the "sudden howl of light" when he opens his refrigerator in the middle of the night. He thinks about "the lovely turquoise exudate, electrical lichen," that forms around the poles of his car batteries. As you may have noticed, Emmett's life is profoundly unextraordinary. He thinks about that too.

That's about all you get, plotwise, but you'll find it's all you need. In A Box of Matches, Baker's first novel in five years--and his first good one in much longer (let's try to forget the clammy sexual intimacies of Vox and The Fermata)--Baker returns to the delightfully discursive, observational voice he used in his first novel, The Mezzanine. But in A Box of Matches this voice has acquired a husky resonance it never had before, a basso register that hints at dark, existential depths. Daydreams of suicide flit at the edge of Emmett's consciousness, intimations of illness, echoes of past pain.

But what Emmett is doing in his early-morning idylls is learning to love the trivia of daily existence--and he finds some of his life's missing meaning there. Baker doesn't just show us this: his prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains, so that as we read, we learn to see the way Emmett sees and find the beauty he finds. By the end of A Box of Matches, Emmett is a different person: a better, happier, more observant person. You just might find that you're one too. --By Lev Grossman