Box of Matches

"[A]marvel of ship-in-a-bottle miniaturism that no one else could have written, or would have thought to write....How anything so wonderful as life--and anything so terrible as death--could evolve from such humble stuff as paper towels is the question preoccupying Baker's narrator....The great, tidal rhythms that usually govern literary storytelling -- ambition and frustration, love and loss, innocence and experience--are replaced here by something more arbitrary, more digital. When time is up in this novel, time is up--ready or not. Which is how it works in life, of course. A structure that may at first seem rather cute, like a technical dare that Baker gave himself when he was feeling restless one afternoon, comes off instead, once the book is on its way, as a melancholy stroke of hyperrealism....His tight-focus set pieces, though astonishing, are really a calculated misdirection; with his hidden hand he's writing about love, the energy beam that, diffracted through the brain and the convex lenses of the eyes, creates the rainbow of objects called the world."Baker, Nicholson is the author of 'Box of Matches ', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375706035 and ISBN 0375706038.