SOURCE: Mars-Jones, Adam. “Larceny.” London Review of Books (24 March 1994): 3, 6.

In the following review, Mars-Jones examines the plot and structure of The Fermata, faulting the book for its overusage of euphemisms and its adolescent stance towards sex.

The hero of The Fermata has an intermittent gift for stopping time, which he exploits entirely for purposes of sexual satisfaction, but Nicholson Baker's trademark as a novelist has always been a fetishising descriptiveness that retards the speed of events almost to the point of non-existence and has in the past generated much literary joy. The ‘action’ of his first, novel, The Mezzanine, consisted of the lunch-hour of a single working day, as experienced by an office worker, but time under the discursive microscope changed its nature. The trivial and quotidian were dignified by the attention given them, and the self-consciously important found no place in the novel's scheme. Towards the end...