Room Temperature: Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker has made a career of writing about small moments in intense detail. This slim book covers his musings whilst giving his 6 month old daughter a bottle of milk.Baker has moments of real perceptiveness, which made you glad you picked up his book, but in-between those moments are chunks of writing which are as dull distractedly feeding a baby can be. In some senses that makes you appreciate the insights more when they come.He writes like no-one else out there and he writes well. This book does not feel like fiction, it feels very much real and honest. However, in the end, this is not a great book.

Room Temperature is certainly about a father and his child, but there is so much more. In typical Baker style, he examines minutia with elucidating commentary. This, in itself, is worth reading the novel; however, the quality that makes it transcend happens to be his ability to unite the entire book with its central theme: Breath. From the comma, to the mobile in his child's room, to tuba lessons, breath pervades - breath as its metaphor to remember to cherish every moment.I have never seen a novel so effortlessly and imperceptibly weave a central idea throughout a book. Read this novel for both it compelling insight but also for the extraordinary literary technique.

A quiet meditation on the life of a brand new father, and how the infant a couple brings into the world somehow encapsulates every memory, every thought, every ounce of love of the husband for the wife. The sound of bacon crackling = the sound of the narrator's wife smiling in bed. How happy would we all be if our moments in thought were spent deeply ruminating over the magical details that make living worthwhile? Why shouldn't feeding your infant from a bottle in a rocking chair be at once everything and nothing?

The twenty minute period is, enchantingly, the time it takes for this daddy to feed his daughter Bug a bottle. As anyone who has sat rocking a child and watching her eat can tell you, you the world can trace through your mind. This little book traces that run of thought, "always true, always new", in the mind of a newish father. His rapture and mindfulness make this a wonderful observation of his world.

If plot is your thing, baker's not for you, but if you're more wooed by rich description and inventive, highly textured imagery that makes something sublime of the mundane, then you would do yourself a favor by reading this book. Extra good for new parents, those undaunted by highfalutin prose and page-long sentence structure, and those with an interest in the intimate interior lives of avuncular first-person narrators.

The book was exactly as described and the quality was great.

Intense mental meanderings. Truthfully, I had to look a lot up, but gratefully learned a lot of new words and ideas.

I do like this author's style, but despite finishing the book I felt it might have been handled differently, the subject matter. He does have keen insights into human nature, but not all of us can relate to them.