SOURCE: Schine, Cathleen. “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” New York Review of Books 41, no. 7 (7 April 1994): 14-15.

In the following review, Schine provides a negative evaluation of The Fermata, denouncing the repetitive use of euphemisms and the tedium associated with the retelling of an act over and over.

In his new novel [The Fermata], Nicholson Baker turns his full attention to the lonely art, the art of masturbation. The narrator, Arno Strine, possesses a strange gift: he can stop time, halting the world around him. “I first stopped time because I liked my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Dobzhansky, and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on,” he says, but adds that it was not lust that impelled him. Sitting in the back of the room, he simply desired to see more clearly, to examine. His teacher stalls midsentence in front of the blackboard, a piece of...