The Mezzanine by Nicholas Baker is a stream of consciousness novel that follows the protaganist’s thoughts during  lunch-hour activities, including the purchase of new shoelaces. Since the novel is basically just the running dialogue of the a person’s thoughts, it includes deep observations of a lot of everyday items. After reading the novel, I came away appreciating the design of everyday objects much more. The book manages to be simultaneously, deep, absurd, and hilarious.

I originally picked up The Mezzanine, after Matt Levine mentioned it during a Reddit AMA as a literary inspiration for his use of footnotes, supplementing his legal experience. The novel’s protaganist indeed praises the “luxuriant incidentalism of footnotes” in certain classic works. Those that appreciate footnotes:

“…know that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italica, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in on mind.”

Great scholarly works can use footnotes as “reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn’t have clear outer boundaries: it doesn’t end with the book; restatement and self-disagreement and the enveloping sea of referenced authorities all continue.”

“Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Additionally, the book indirectly considers a lot of Epistemological questions. The protagonist wonders what influences his thoughts:

“Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?”