SOURCE: Towers, Robert. “Secret Histories.” New York Review of Books 39, no. 7 (9 April 1992): 35-6.

In the following excerpt, Towers discusses the dialogue, characters, and storyline in Vox, noting that the work is an amusing read.

Nicholson Baker is a fiction writer of great charm who may or may not be a novelist. Certainly narrative is the least of his concerns. In The Mezzanine (1988) the “action” begins with the narrator's entrance into the office building where he works and concludes with his ascent of the escalator to the mezzanine floor. The interval between these two events occupies almost as many pages (135) as Laurence Sterne devoted to the digression-filled gap between the conception and the birth of Tristram Shandy. For Baker, like Sterne, the soul, and indeed the body, of the novel consists of digressions—digressions which in Baker's case are augmented by footnotes that can run for as many as...