ABSTRACT
A broken shoelace is only a minor inconvenience. It might cause a shoe to become annoyingly loose, slip off your heel as you make your way to the supermarket to buy a replacement. If you happen to be a runner in the Olympic Games, it might make you lose a race, disappoint some fans. But that’s about the worst of it. Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine is a novel that takes a broken shoelace very seriously, however, as it does the malfunctioning of other relatively benign and inconsequential objects-drinking straws with too much buoyancy, ineffective hand driers, unpopular shampoo brands. Logic would have it that The Mezzanine is then also an inconsequential novel, a text of domestic trivialities and pedantry. And as if mirroring this narrative content, it is also a very small book, the outward antithesis of other maximalist works studied here. Barely 100 pages long and confined in time and space to an uneventful lunch break and a trip up an escalator, it looks like a novel of the miniature or minimalist, the Blakean grain of sand, rather than the gigantic, excessive, door-stopping maximalism of Wallace and Pynchon.
