The Anthologist

Poet Paul Chowder has hit a run of bad luck. His own poetry, particularly a sequence about a flying spoon, is going nowhere. His girlfriend, fed up with his writer’s block and general wishy-washiness, has left him. Chowder’s latest assignment—to write the introduction to a new poetry anthology—should come easily, considering his encyclopedic knowledge of writers old and new. But this too eludes him, as he sinks deeper into his isolating ruminations about authors (Roethke, Bogan, Swinburne et al.) and his dog, Smacko.

Poetry might seem a somewhat weighty topic for Baker’s fiction, which in the past has explored, in minute detail, everyday stuff like phone sex (Vox) and riding the escalator (The Mezzanine). But it turns out that the novelist’s obsessive flourishes make Chowder a tragic and deeply funny narrator. Baker gives us a character who offers informed—and increasingly crazy—monologues about the lost art of rhyming, the importance of “rests” in tetrameter and the dangers that antidepressants pose for poets.

Depression, Chowder points out, is the engine for great poets (although he draws the line at Larkin, whom he deems too depressing to read). He wonders whether Browning’s sonnets or Longfellow’s “The Fire of Drift-Wood” would have ever been written had they been popping happy pills. Chowder’s own problem seems to be that he’s bummed out but not quite sad enough himself to write good work. Suffering for art is a pretty antiquated idea, but there is something winning about Chowder’s dim night of the soul. Here, it evokes not just inspired looniness, but also an increasingly complex example of self-exploration.—Drew Toal

Baker reads at the Brooklyn Book Festival Sept 13.

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