Novel: The Anthologist

Overview
Paul Chowder, a wry and compulsively self-questioning poet, is tasked with writing the introduction to an anthology of contemporary poetry. What begins as a commission to explain why poetry, and especially rhyme, matters becomes a labyrinthine internal monologue that wanders across craft, memory, sex, and fear. The promised introduction never arrives in tidy, teachable form; instead the novel unfolds as a long, breathless, witty soliloquy that repeatedly circles the obligation of composing an anthology preface while revealing the mind that is trying and sometimes failing to meet it.
Narrative momentum comes less from external events than from Paul's associative leaps. He frets over the ethics of editorial selection, the pleasures and pitfalls of rhyming, and the demands of an audience. Small episodes, a missed appointment, a squabble with an editor, an awkward sexual encounter, are amplified into extended reflections that blend anecdote, close reading, and polemic. The book's surface is comic and chatty; underneath it is a probing inquiry into why writing matters when the writer feels diminished by life's ordinary humiliations.

Main Character and Conflict
Paul is part braggart, part coward, and part pedant, a man who knows a great deal about rhyme schemes yet struggles to marshal himself into a sustained act of work. His immediate adversary is not a villain but inertia: temptation to procrastinate, anxiety about failure, and the seductive digression. He also contends with the shame and vulnerability of aging and romantic instability, which complicate any attempt to claim authority on poetry for younger readers and poets.
The narrative's voice carries both affection and exasperation for its protagonist. Paul's comic self-sabotage, his tendency to argue with himself, to imagine hostile critics, to rehearse embarrassing scenes, makes the book as much a portrait of a temperament as a study of verse. The tension between wanting to teach and wanting to be forgiven his own flaws fuels the novel's emotional core.

Style and Technique
The Anthologist is written as a sustained first-person address, rich in digression and rhetorical play. Nicholson Baker deploys long, flowing sentences and a conversational cadence that mimics a speaker who can't quite stop talking. The prose turns small observations into extended riffs on form: meter and rhyme become metaphors for fidelity, connection, and loss. Baker's ear for language, his affection for the sound of words and the mechanics of poetic craft, gives the book a tactile musicality even when it is chiefly prose.
Formal experiments pepper the narrative: catalogues of rhymes, simulated footnotes, and miniature close readings appear alongside comic set pieces. These moments are not merely showmanship; they enact Paul's attempt to reconcile technical understanding with lived feeling, arguing that the nitty-gritty of craft is inseparable from the moral and emotional stakes of making art.

Themes
Questions about authorship, authority, and the purpose of an anthology recur. The novel asks whether a single voice can legitimately curate the work of many, and whether explanation enriches or diminishes readers' encounters with poems. Memory and desire appear as twin engines of creativity and distraction, and the book repeatedly returns to the dilemma of making art amid personal embarrassment and public doubt.
Underlying the humor is a tender concern for human connection. Rhyme functions as a metaphor for connection, how sounds meet and resolve, and Baker probes whether those harmonies can sustain a life or rescue a lonely speaker. The result is both an affectionate defense of poetry's pleasures and a candid depiction of a writer's fragile confidence.

Reception and Impact
The Anthologist drew attention for its unusual premise and its virtuoso prose voice, appealing to readers who relish linguistic play and introspective comedy. Responses ranged from admiration for Baker's audacity and ear to impatience with the book's digressive structure and unreliable, self-indulgent narrator. For many, it remains a spirited, idiosyncratic meditation on poets, poetry, and the human impulse to explain the things one loves.