Room Temperature

Nicholson Baker

On an autumn day, at around three-fifteen in the afternoon, Mike sits down in the rocking chair to feed his infant daughter, Bug. The novel that unfolds over the next twenty minutes of Mike’s life is a warmly comic masterpiece of observation, reflection and digression. Baker brilliantly recreates Mike’s roving mind, with its tangential thoughts about peanut butter and its big questions about fatherhood, marriage, and love. The result is surprisingly thrilling to read: funny, linguistically exuberant, tender and alive to the small mysteries and pleasures of everyday life.

Nicholson Barker flips crazily between high culture and low farce, swinging from Frances Yate's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition to the stealth required in picking one's nose. If he can cram this sort of wealth into half an hour's baby minding one quivers to think how he would sport with a thousand years of solitude

Anthony Quinn, Listener

What emerges from Room Temperature is something much grimmer than appears at first sight, and more melancholy - a landscape where the ghost of Nabokov lives, and which Baker looks as if he is soon to enter

Andrew Motion, Observer

Sparkling ... frequently hilarious...This is a big novel unfolding ... so subtly that one is scarcely aware of its magnitude until the last page

Boston Globe

The Author

Nicholson Baker was born in New York in 1957. He is the author of eight novels, including The Mezzanine, Vox and Room Temperature, all published by Granta Books, and five non-fiction works, including a book about John Updike, U & I, and Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, for which he won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award.

More about the author →