Thursday, September 1, 2022
The Mezzanine
In "The Mezzanine" I found it quite interesting how diverse Howie's thoughts could be. He could at one time be talking about the shoelaces then jump to the corporate bathroom where one of his coworker didn't wash his hands. The thoughts Howie has are very random at times but seem to fit in somehow or another with corporate life. Even though the thoughts seems random to us, they follow a steady stream of thoughts that connect together in the big picture. Howie thinks about every little thing he does and applies some of them to a bigger picture. The plot in the book is where Howie has a one hour lunch hour and then rides the escalator back up to the Mezzanine level so it does follow some "guidelines" of a novel. Even though Howie seems unrelatable at first due to his thoughts, eventually through the book we see that we have thoughts like him as well.
Howie's thoughts get deep into some internal private things we think but that we don't share which can be uncomfortable but they do seem to fit together in the plot of the novel. The thoughts however can help us learn from him and relate to his actions and daily life. Even though Howie lives a different life than me like at a different time and he's older, some of the internal thoughts ring bells to things that I do in my daily life. For example when Howie says "More important, the fact that I had not yet begun to urinate was known to him as well"(83-84). This shows how it can be relatable but also private things that you normally would not read or write about but it connects to us because it is something we do everyday.
Overall "The Mezzanine" was a book that at first was hard to follow due to the footnotes and the jumbled thoughts, but after the first few chapters I was able to figure out the footnotes and chapter content better. I thought that the way his life was addressed was very unique and that I had never seen anything like it. The more the book went on the more I was able to dive into the aspects of his life and really figure out who Howie was and how his life was. The book going back and forth in time was also a little confusing but seemed to tie together in the end when he reached the Mezzanine level which was the main plot to the book.
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One thing that fascinated me was just the pace at which Howie's thoughts would transition. In the same page Baker could address multiple different aspects of Howie's thinking, however, there were also instances where he would focus on one thing for an extremely long time. I think this might be something else that Baker does to with Howie's thoughts to make him seem more relatable, along with the uncomfortable private thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI agree in the sense that the Mezzanine doesn't make a lot of sense to us because it's inside of Howie's head and tis too real. But when you take a step back to think about it, our minds work in the same way, we just don't tend to write down every little thing. As you mention the book does also go to more private moments such as the bathroom which can make us feel uncomfy as a reader from the outside.
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