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Book review – Traveling Sprinkler by Nicolson Baker

By October 15, 2019No Comments

Book Review – Traveling Sprinkler by Nicolson Baker

The only other book of Nicolson Baker I have read was in 1993. It was Vox, and it made him briefly famous, because the entire book was a single conversation between two young people on a phone sex line. He famously said that in order to research this book he frequented sex lines, often to the point of orgasm. Novel verite, I suppose.

He has written a number of novels and non-fictions since, none of which I have read. This book is also very strange, although nothing like Vox (there is no sex in this one). More importantly this is one the sweetest and most affecting love stories I have read in while, told through the eyes of one of the sweetest and oddest of men you will ever meet. He is Paul Chowder, an ex-bassoon player, a lonely and unemployed poet of very minor repute, bereft of his ex-girlfriend, chasing a hilariously impractical and doomed late life career as composer of doggerel-soaked pop songs (and embarrassingly awful protest songs bemoaning malfeasance and nastiness  everywhere).

Oh, and along the way we discover a great deal about amateur cigar smoking, the mechanics of the bassoon, the diversity of cheap digital home studio software, the lyrics to a great many memorable or forgettable pop songs by various hitmakers, commentary on scores of poems and poets, a long treatise on DeBussy, the politics of drone warfare, a ramble on the joys of driving in an old car, a lecture on the history and genius of the Sears traveling water sprinkler. Quirky doesn’t begin to describe our hope-filled hero. And throughout this book we sit inside his head as he stumbles through the most heartbreaking and puppy-dog approaches to winning his ex-girlfriend back for life, so gentle and earnest and good-natured you just yip with delight and root for him with beating heart.

It is almost impossible not to fall in love with this idiosyncratic and offbeat eccentric as he thinks his weird thoughts and spins his oddly simple and wonderful monologues about all manner of arcana, while optimistically and doggedly working to win back his lost love from the smart and successful doctor with whom she has become entangled.

Join him on his romantic quest in this quiet little journey of introspection and yearning. It will be worth it.

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