The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker [TRADE PAPERBACK] 1990 • Vintage Contemporaries

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

TRADE PAPERBACK RE-ISSUE [1990] VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

Rare Vintage Contemporaries edition with great cover art by Theo Rudnak.  2nd print.

Trade paperback in excellent condition.  Light wear to cover; some creasing to upper corner on rear.  Reads good as new.

In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel—first published in 1986—the author of Vox and The Fermata uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. 

Although most of the action of The Mezzanine occurs on the escalator of an office building, where its narrator is returning to work after buying shoelaces, this startlingly inventive and witty novel takes us farther than most fiction written today. It lends to milk cartons the associative richness of Marcel Proust's madeleines. It names the eight most significant advances in a human life —beginning with shoe-tying. It asks whether the hot air blowers in bathrooms really are more sanitary than towels. And it casts a dazzling light on our relations with the objects and people we usually take for granted.