Nicholson Baker creates stories that dig beneath dull exterior lives

Nicholson Baker writes novels about rich inner lives and mundane exterior ones.

His first novel, The Mezzanine, takes place entirely during one office worker’s unremarkable lunch hour.

In A Box of Matches, an editor of medical textbooks records the minutiae of his life, including the doings of the family duck.

Baker’s two Paul Chowder novels, recently published in one volume, follow suit. In The Anthologist, the affable if ineffectual Chowder, a poet whose skills are sputtering, attempts for months to write the introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry. And, he sits by the creek in a white plastic chair, shampoos his dog, and tries to win back his girlfriend, Roz, who has left out of frustration with Paul’s inability to accomplish, well, just about anything.

Traveling Sprinkler revisits Paul, who has (spoiler alert!) finally finished the anthology introduction, and now is trying to teach himself to write a protest song on the guitar, is smoking cigars, talking about going to the gym and attempting to win back Roz.

Baker, 57, spoke with The Dispatch from his home in southern Maine in advance of his appearance Tuesday in the Thurber House “Evenings with Authors” series.

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Q: How would you describe Paul Chowder to someone who hasn’t read the novels?

A: He’s a guy stumbling through life, trying to figure out what he wants to pass on to other people and what he wants to keep private.

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Q: Were you surprised that you weren’t done with Paul after the first novel?

A: I thought I was done with him, but it turned out that he was someone I liked, and I wanted to hear what he had to say about other things.

What actually happened was that I was in the middle of writing a nonfiction book about trying to write a protest song, and I found out that it was easier to write the book in Paul Chowder’s voice than in my own voice.

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Q: What does writing in his voice let you do that you couldn’t do in your own?

A: Opinions are always dangerous. When you’re a writer who has written serious nonfiction books, there’s something inhibiting about expressing a frank opinion about someone or something.

Say, Picasso — I have certain reservations about Picasso. So I just put them in his mouth and let him run with it. He’s just a little bit more liberated than I am. He’s also lonelier than I am. I’m a happily married guy who lives in Maine. He lives about 20 miles away, in Portsmouth, N.H. I’m a prose writer, and he’s a poet. So there’s just enough of a shift. It allows me to be a ventriloquist.

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Q: How did you choose Portsmouth for the setting?

A: Portsmouth is probably my favorite city.

When my children were growing up, Portsmouth was the big city down a long, straight road. They could go there and have that urban feeling of wandering around. It’s a beautiful, brick city with narrow streets. It’s got culture, it’s got a little bit of a seedy past.

And one important thing from the point of view of a novelist — other novelists haven’t walked its streets, the way they have New York, Chicago, L.A. It feels like new terrain.

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Q: Roz holds the novels together, doesn’t she?

A: Roz is the love of his life. She’s based very closely on my wife. She’s somebody who finally loses patience with Paul and thinks that he is squandering his talent. So she breaks up with him and takes up with this horribly successful, smart, contrarian doctor. So he has to win her back, as an adult.

Real love stories don’t follow the plotlines of romantic comedies. Even though I love romantic comedy movies, real life doesn’t really go that way.

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• Nicholson Baker will appear at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Columbus Museum of Art, 480 E. Broad St. For tickets, call 614-464-1032, Ext. 11, or visit www.thurberhouse.org.