The Fermata

Nicholson Baker's novel, The Fermata, is the fictional autobiography of a man, Arno Strine, who can stop time for the rest of the world, while he continues to act and think. He mainly uses his power to drop into the Fermata (or enter the Fold or instigate an Estoppel) to undress women and gratify himself with their stationary bodies.

The best fiction is tragic; it depicts human suffering or the impossibility of fulfillment while conveying the beauty and nobility of human life. The Fermata is devoid of the tragic. Arno's physical suffering is limited to a passing case of carpal tunnel syndrome and a busted lip. He is immune to psychological pain and utterly content with his lot in life.

The quality of Arno's writing and subjects he addresses leave no doubt that he is a genius. If a genius could stop time, wouldn't he use that power to advance the political causes he supports or remake the world according to his ideals? Arno pauses time only to undress women and figure out people's names when he runs into acquaintances who recognize him. In the one larger ambition he mentions, he drops into the Fold to undress the inhabitants of a small town, and turns time on with their clothes piled up in the town square. (Chapter 13). In response to the criticism that he perverts time frivolously, he says, "What else [is] there in the world besides masturbation? Nothing." (Chapter 8). It's a good comeback.

The happiness of the book runs against the grain of my character, but it's an undeniably great piece of fiction. Baker is a virtuosic writer. His writing is informal but intricate and atomically precise. Effort is necessary to parse his best descriptions, but the effort is rewarded when the image created by the writing comes into focus. Baker's description of the french braid of the woman who has caught Arno's eye packs a big payoff:

It is arranged in what I think is called a French braid. Each of the solid clumps of her hair feeds into the overall solidity of the braid, and the whole structure is plaited as part of her head, like a set of glossy external vertebrae. I'm impressed that women are able to arrange this sort of complicated figure, without too many stray strands, without help, in the morning, by feel. Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. ("Panties" is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce's braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm. (Chapter 1).

An account of towels spinning in a washing machine exhausts the reader before giving up its reward:

At its peak speed, the basket of a clothes-washer turns at something like six hundred revolutions per minute. Towels, which are ordinarily the very soul of magnanimous absorbency, are at six hundred r.p.m. compressed into loutish, wedge-shaped chunks of raw textility, apotheoses of waddedness, their folds so conclusively superimposed, and their thousands of gently torqued turf-tassels so expunged, or exsponged, of reserve capacity, that I feel, after the last steady pints of blue-gray water have pulsed from the exit hose and the loud tick from within the machine signals some final disengagement of its transmission, and the spinning slows and stops, as if I am tossing boneless hams or (in the case of washcloths) little steaks into the dryer, rather than potential exhibits in a fabric-softener testimonial. (Chapter 7).

Just after starting the autobiography, Arno articulates the main challenge that writing poses for me (aside from coming up with something interesting to say):

it is just as hard to write during a Fermation as it is in real time. You still must dole out all the things you have to say one by one, when what you want of course is to say them all at once. But I am going to give it a try. (Chapter 1).

I thought that brilliant writers were spared the urge to write everything at once and that setting their thoughts down one at a time came naturally for them. That that is not the case increases my resolve to try to write well.

Arno stops time to write erotica (or "rot" as he calls it) which he conceals so that attractive women will stumble upon it (and become aroused by it, he hopes) when he turns time back on. The rot is hilariously over-the-top. While he is sunbathing in his backyard on a towel, before discovering that he can stop time by pushing his glasses up his nose, he fights the urge to masturbate:

I knew that I was almost ready to turn over on my back, and I knew that if I turned over on my back my bathing suit would come off a minute later (and who cared if anyone saw me--I wanted people to see me! ...), and once my my bathing suit was off, my Juiceman would writhe and elongate against my thigh until, in attempting to rise and make a drunken statement, it would lose its balance and fall heavily back against my hip bone, where it would writhe some more. (Chapter 8).

The money shot at the end of the first piece of rot is unforgettable. The female character, Marian the Librarian, has mounted a dildo to the floor of a delivery truck and fucks it as the truck bounces over a country road while the driver looks on ecstatically:

The UPS man had his head cranked around and was watching her crammed crotch, pop-eyed. He made a vowelly groan and lifted his butt clear off the seat. "Oh, here it comes!" he said. With a final upward fist-stroke, his squat thick dick blew a united parcel of peckerpaste all over the sleeve of his uniform. "Ooh, yeah babe. Ooh yeah."

During Arno's second work of rot, Marian the Librarian persuades a teenaged girl to take a shit while the girl sucks off her boyfriend in Marian's garden:

Sylvie moaned again. Her asshole domed and opened wider, and a big dark hard dickshape began to push its way straight out. Marian held the napkin underneath. "Oh yeah. Keep pushing baby. Push it all out." She felt the weight drop in her hand and immediately folded the napkin over it and sprayed Sylvie clean.

While catching and disposing of the turd, Marian is squatting over an antique platter to which was mounted a dildo inserted into Marian's anus. El oh el.

Arno has weighty things to say about consciousness. He believes that a force like the centrifugal force is necessary to draw a coherent identity out of the chaos of memories and desires that make up a human being's mental experiences. His analogy has overtones of cognitive science. Each person's "I" is a top level process that runs above and mediates between all the other conscious and unconscious routines in the brain.

in order to write my life properly I need the entire receptacle of my consciousness spun, as the ultracentrifuge's rotor spins its vials of biological freight, fast enough to conquer diffusion and impose some artificial order. I need to dangle in a severe vacuum from a one-tenth-inch-thick length of piano wire ..., while a xenon lamp flashes some unforgiving wavelength over my memory sample, rotating sixty times faster than the washing machine in my basement did--I want all of the semi-remembered images of half-dressed women, all these fragments of my voyeuristic history, that still remain in messy colloidal suspension to fly around at the speed of insight until they are compelled to file themselves away once and for all into neat radial gradients of macromolecular uniformity, like layered cocktails or fancy multicolored creations in Jell-O.

I happen to know, from a three-week assignment in the research department of Kilmer Pharmaceuticals ..., that biochemists routinely use the centrifuge ... to spin down, or "pellet," lengths of DNA in order to purify or clean them. And everything in the mind--that final triumph of protein chemistry--is likewise in helpless motion, afloat, diffuse, impure, unwilling to commit to precipitation: only an artificially induced pensive force of hundreds of thousands of gravities can spin down some intelligible fraction of one's true past self, one's frustratingly polydisperse personality, into a pellet of print.

Baker does not explicitly complete the analogy between the centrifugal force that pulls water out of laundry and makes DNA pellet and the force that allows Arno to spin down his past into a coherent narrative. In the reality of the reader, Baker himself is the spinning force that creates Arno's narrative. In the world of the book, what is the force turning Arno's past into a narrative? I think it is Arno's consciousness. The book is a celebration of the mind.