I always wonder, what would people think if they knew what I was thinking? If they had two ears to a side, one for my words, and one for my thoughts? It would be one thing to hear me say it's too hot in here and think why have I only been to Jarling's once?, and quite another thing to see me walk down the hallway thinking about how if I kept the Jar of Alternate Life in my backpack, I could catch the cockroach that is almost guaranteed to appear in Stats class, and people would either be really scared or really impressed1. And that thought would be a sub-thought of the larger thought that was revealed at the beginning of this paragraph, a recurring thought that popped in and out of my head as I read Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine.
In this novel we get such an intimate look at Howie's day-to-day life that I feel like I know him more than I know any flesh-and-bone person, because I've been given a 133 page window to his mind. I may not know where he grew up or what his favorite color is, but I get to know his personality through the way he writes this "memoir" and the fact that this memoir expounds upon the intricacies of a random hour of his lunch life. Just the way Howie thinks tells us more about him than his words need to say: he's the person who would value the effort you put into sketching your art homework and constructively break down the pros and cons of your technique (in the same way that he really appreciates the straw, and also has strong opinions on how it should be engineered), he would be the most avid blogger (and his enthusiasm, more than the content of his blog, would be the selling point there), and somehow I imagine he would be a huge fan of Lego's because he's captivated by structure, details (which also relates to how much of a organized writer he is, and the details in his sentences are the adjectives he drops in front of things like stapler to create a casual but who-would-have-thought-of-that kind of metaphor2).
While the novel puts us in this intimate relationship with Howie, I keep imagining how different our relationship with him would be if we were one of his coworkers who just knew Howie as the two-year-old employee who works in the office by Tina's desk.3 Can people act "normal" and focused when all they're really thinking about is The Shoelace Theory? Apparently so, because while Howie's mind is riding off into the sunset with one idea after another, he seems to be drawing no particular attention to himself while he's playing his escalator game, and from the outside it seems like the most typical kind of office day. So the existential crisis I found myself in while reading this novel revolves around the question of how much we really know other people. How much do I really know about my best friend or my younger brother? Only as much as they decide to put forth, in conversation, in their behavior, their attitude. We can see that Howie is conscious of how he's interacting with other people (when he explains the conventions of making small talk with your coworker, or peeing in the men's bathroom) and of what image he's broadcasting (like when he talks about the implications of carrying a paper bag to "hide" your embarrassing or not-so-embarrassing purchases). But if I only knew him by the image he painted on, then would I get to know the real "Howie," who thinks about straws and shoelaces and stops to notice the changing shapes of doorknobs? If he was a real person I knew, then would I think he was weird if I was privy to the kinds of things he thought about? I want to say no, but I would probably think he was childish or simple (in the negative sense of the word) or incapable of understanding larger issues. So maybe both he and I would get along better if he painted an image for me and I for him, so we could interact more comfortably? And isn't that just the way things are?
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1. Don't be alarmed, I was just thinking of catching the cockroach for bug bio. We all have our own jars filled with ehtyl acetate that Mr. Stone traditionally calls the "killing jar," but this was recently renamed. Also, Stats class is in the basement of DCL and is reportedly frequented by roaches! Good or bad or both?
2. Thinking of "brontosaural stapler" here
3. OR if we were reading about Howie in a book written by an Arnold-Bennett-esque author.
Um, if you're looking for some primo cockroaches, may I recommend Hue House? They're (usually) already dead by the time we see them, but sometimes they're in the midst of dying!
ReplyDeleteI like how you note that the whole "bag" issue--the need to politely conceal our private purchases--could work as a metaphor for the narrative as a whole. There's the external Howie who functions like a responsible and effective employee of the firm, and there's Howie the writer, daydreamer, theory-spinner--the guy we meet in his memoir. With both images in mind, it's hard not to conclude that the one we meet in these pages is the "real" Howie, hidden by the public facade of a functional adult. But, given how often his memoir focuses on the little unheralded "advances" that make him more "adult," they're maybe more closely linked than might first appear. It's not as if he's assiduously *hiding* all this stuff from everyone--if they were to ask, or if it were to come up in conversation, I imagine he'd be more than willing to spin a riff on drinking straws. I imagine L. hears it all the time.