When my now-wife Nicolette lent me her hardcover edition of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker in 2016, I regarded it as a strange and somewhat foreboding presence. For the two to five months that it sat unread on my desk—in part due to the thick pieces of yellowing paper with indecipherable scrawls that were glued to the insides of the front and back covers (Nicolette had bought it used), and in part due to the way lent books generally tended to oppress me, beckoning me until I read them, which paradoxically caused me not to want to read them—it created a low-level, one-sided strain on my burgeoning relationship. The novel’s vivid presence in my bedroom—lying dumbly on my desk next to a mess of papers and books—slowly faded until I could barely see it; but as The Mezzanine disappeared with repeated sight, it grew ever more vivid in my mind: The Mezzanine expanded inside me, as all neglected obligations, like a tumor; it became burdensome and big, afflicting me, especially when I considered that I would need to respond to it in a way that not only matched Nicolette’s enthusiasm but was also insightful (Nicolette and I had only been dating for one or two months when she lent me the book, and I wanted to impress her)—feeling the increasingly tortuous fact of The Mezzanine half-reveal itself in my mind whenever we talked on the phone—“Is she going to ask about The Mezzanine?”; “Should I just lie and say I started it,1 then actually start it after we hang up the phone?”—then slink back into my subconscious after we hung up.
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