THE ANTHOLOGIST, by Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster; 256 pages; $24.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — "What is poetry?" asks Paul Chowder in the beginning of "The Anthologist." He proceeds to answer his own question: "Poetry is prose in slow motion."
Which sounds good, until you think about it. That's typical of Chowder, for he has spent months attempting to write an introduction for a volume of rhymed poetry. Actually, he hasn't written a word. He sits in his barn office and sings to himself, or postulates random deep thoughts, rather in the manner of Stuart Smalley.
He makes a list of people he's jealous of: James Fenton, Sinead O'Connor, Lorenz Hart, Jon Stewart, Billy Collins. Especially Collins, "that charming, chirping crack whore."
Once a promising young poet, Chowder is now past 50 and floundering. He isn't published because he isn't writing, witness the stalled anthology. He's also broke — he couldn't take all the bad poetry he had to read when he was teaching, so he quit. The only hope of money on the horizon is $7,000 for the anthology and the introduction ... the one he can't bring himself to write.
His girlfriend, Roz, for whom the phrase "long suffering" was coined, has grown weary of her manchild. After eight years of trying to jolly him out of his inertia, she loses faith in him, which gradually leaches away the love. She moves out. Every once in a while, Paul has a meal with his friend Tim, who's teaching school and writing a book about Queen Victoria's imperialist tendencies. The book is titled "Killer Queen."
Paul Chowder is in deep trouble.
Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist" is, as usual with this author, alternately dry and funny and dry and sad. Baker has hacked out a strange little niche for himself — novels about obsessive-compulsives, in this case one with writer's block.
Writer's block can be creepy — "The Shining" — and writer's block can be funny, but I never thought writer's block could be both, but Baker has pulled it off.
Mainly, it's funny because Baker mixes so many things into Chowder's frantic mental stew. A learned exegesis on iambic pentameter will be suddenly interrupted by Chowder watching the mouse come out from under the stove looking for crumbs. His realization that Roz has bailed is immediately followed by the realization that his dog is shedding heavily, but that's OK because birds can use the hair to build their nests, which is followed by the casual wish to score some grass.
It's the novel as non sequitur, but Baker keeps it aloft because Chowder is an amiable schlub who you can't help liking, at least at the remove of a man on the page. He's like a hyperactive Labrador forever being distracted by squirrels, except in his case the hyperactivity is masking what is clearly clinical depression.
Very occasionally, Chowder tells himself the core truth: "My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I'm a study in failure."
As the novel proceeds, you begin to worry, not that Chowder will be unable to write his introduction, but that Chowder will be unable to stay alive. Every time he makes a sandwich he ends up cutting himself, and the cuts are getting worse and worse. And when a neighbor asks him to help install a new floor, the thought of Chowder working with power tools is terrifying.
Occasionally his thoughts lurch to death, because so much of poetry concerns itself with that or love. Chowder may be a schlub, but he's not a stupid schlub; some of his thoughts on poetry are wonderful, as with his take on Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."
Some of his thoughts about life are worthwhile as well: "Spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis."
Writing about writing — or, in this particular case, writing about not writing — is not my favorite genre, but Baker manages to put a wry twist on Chowder's frantic search for the lint in his navel. This is a quiet, cumulatively autumnal novel that even has a moral — something about coming to terms with small pleasures and, by extension, yourself.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.