39 Books: 1996

It's a commonplace that in reading novels one can escape the ravages of time. In 1994, I borrowed my student housemate's innocent-looking hardback edition of Nicholson Baker's The Fermata in which Arno Strine writes about how he can actually stop time. The title refers to the sign in music scores, as seen on the cover, indicating "a pause of unspecified length on a note or rest".

What he does with the superpower divided critical opinion, with Victoria Glendinning calling it "a repellent book" and another an "unlikely masterpiece" (I side with the latter). Adam Mars-Jones was his usual considered self with his criticism of the treatment of Baker's theme, which he says is "the innocence of male sexual desire", which must be the reason for my housemate's purchase, as he has made a significant career out of the psychology of mating. 

Two years later, I bought a second-hand paperback with the cover quote "The funniest book about sex ever written". While this is the obvious 'about', I did wonder why nobody had noted that it was also a metafiction on the ethics of fiction as an artefact of the imagination.* Freud said the imagination doesn't know 'no' and, in the 'fold', neither does Arno Strine. We tend to think of fiction as 'exploring' a subject and ethics arises as  as immanent to fiction: the questioning of Paul West's choice in The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg to describe the execution of those who plotted to assassinate Hitler, as discussed in JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, or Karl Ove Knausgaard violating the privacy of his family in his autofictional series. But what The Fermata does is something very different: the imagination is embodied in a plot device and becomes real without being realistic; it is beyond realism. This would explain why Adam Mars-Jones complains that is a "protracted refusal to engage with sexual consequence" and why "Baker almost takes pride in elaborating his theme more or less indefinitely, without actually exploring it". The book is the embodiment of the theme and we inhabit it.

Twenty-eight years later, writing this series means I don't have time to read again all 303 pages of The Fermata, and while that may appear to be a cop-out, I am reminded of the fuss I make about titles – see the entries for 1985 and 1986 – and how we often remember the titles of novels without remembering much of the detail and instead hold in our memory not a detail but the idea of the work, its unexposed kernal, promised by the overt content.

* Incidentally, I had a similarly solitary reaction to Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts, which I remember talking about as we walked out of the Duke of York's in Brighton, going through each separate 'cut' noting the evidence of how they were all underlined by the same theme, and yet never heard the same analysis anywhere else.