The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

Overview

Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."—San Francisco Chronicle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679759331
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/24/1995
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	238,784
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nicholson Baker has published five novels–The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, and The Everlasting Story of Nory–and two works of nonfiction, U and I and The Size of Thoughts. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.

Date of Birth:

1954

Place of Birth:

Rochester, NY

Education:

B.A. in English, Haverford College, 1980

Editorial Reviews

Baker follows his surprise bestseller, Vox , with a novel once again filled with elaborate sexual fantasies. The "fermata'' of the title refers to the fold in time that narrator Arno Strine can induce; this allows him to stop the flow of events around him and proceed in his own fashion to undress unsuspecting women. The 35-year-old Strine, appropriately enough, works as a "temp'' in Boston, moving in and out of various office situations, completing his business and then disappearing. Despite his questionable ethics while "in the fold''--fondling women's breasts, going through their pocketbooks, writing erotic marginalia in the books they are browsing, stopping their cars and replacing their music cassettes with ones containing his own pornographic compositions--Strine is blithely confident that, since he means no ill will, he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite Baker's vaunted object fetishism, which in all his books registers as an unparalleled gift for description, he once again fails to find a novelistic context that would lend his art any lasting resonance. The sexual escapades here--a lonely woman's fascination with sexual toys strapped to a riding lawnmower; a laboratory investigation of the role masturbation might play in Strine's carpal tunnel problem--border on the ludicrous, however titillating. Still, many Vox readers will flock to this erudite smut even as Baker stalls in his campaign to eventually succeed Updike as America's most polished stylist. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Having raised temperatures with the long-distance sex in his best-selling Vox ( LJ 11/15/91), Baker here promises to test "how far is too far,'' notes his publicist.

Library Journal