SOURCE: Trestail, Joanne. “Riding the Pause Control: What Would We Do, Asks Nicholson Baker, If We Could Step in and out of Time?” Chicago Tribune Books (6 February 1994): 3.

In the following review, Trestail discusses the plot and style of The Fermata, acknowledging that the work is original, funny, and contains descriptions of precise detail.

One way to talk about Nicholson Baker's books is in terms of their subject matter, and that's easy. The Mezzanine (1986), Baker's heavily footnoted first novel, follows an office worker through his lunch hour as he buys shoelaces, uses the men's room, rides escalators and ponders his stapler. The second, Room Temperature, tracks a father's thoughts as he sits by a window holding his sleeping 6-month-old daughter.

Those books were called novels only because no one could think of a better word for them. Then came the even more uncategorizable U and I, subtitled “A True...