Hot, Bothered, and Bored

Nicholson Baker’s new novel is great as pornography but utterly fails as a novel, albeit a funny one. Malcolm Jones on America’s great erotic laureate—and just what is a “Malcolm Gladwell.”

The Book Beast - Aug 8, 2011 

Every book reviewer nurses some version of the waking nightmare where he reviews James Joyce’s Ulysses and does not realize that it’s a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. So when confronted with Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, a collection of graphic sex scenes that calls itself a novel, one wonders if this is not some elaborate literary prank wherein Baker has married the porn novel to, say, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

After all, Baker has won a national Book Critics Circle Award. He has penned elegant novels about, among other things, a man buying shoelaces and a man contemplating the assassination of President George W. Bush. His nonfiction has a similar range: a fan’s notes on John Updike, the troubles of newspaper and library archives, the motives behind World War II. Then again, he is also the author of Vox, the erotic novel that Monica Lewinsky supposedly gave Bill Clinton as a present. That would make him the nation’s most visible pornographer.
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