`Fermata': A Voyeur's Narrow Focus

"What else was there in the world," muses Arno Strine, "but masturbation? Nothing."

Well, Arno, here are a few suggestions . . .

Not many, unfortunately, intrude upon the small patch of life he stakes out in Nicholson Baker's curious new novel, "The Fermata" (Random House, $21). For one whose life, both social and sexual, is animated principally by voyeurism, Arno's outlook is amazingly narrow.

Voyeurs, it seems, know what they like and doggedly stick to it. In Arno's case, this means motionless, undressed women, particularly their breasts and genitals. And Arno's frequent response when his obsession is fulfilled, as it often is in "The Fermata," is masturbation.

Outrage - and praise

Unless you suffered brain-pan meltdown from the Tonya-rama of recent weeks, you know that "The Fermata" has been called infantile and misogynistic, that it has evoked critical opinion ranging from derisive outrage to rhapsodic praise.

"Baker has written a book that describes precisely the sexual and moral landscape of an adolescent male," crabbed Lynn Darling in Esquire. "The truly scary thing is that he would have us believe that this creature" - that's Arno she's talking about - "lives on in most men long after the hormones have loosened their choke hold on the male brain."

In a counter opinion in San Francisco Focus, novelist Mary Gaitskill risked sounding like an old Baker chum to enthuse that "The Fermata" is "bursting with sex and beauty, wound together profoundly and pornographically. (Huh?) It is bountifully Rabelaisian and intensely refined." Moreover, a "deep respect for the seriousness and purity of unadorned sex pervades Baker's book . . . For that reason alone, `The Fermata' should be celebrated."

Presumably Gaitskill isn't thinking here of Baker's story-within-the-story, the sexual adventure of one Marian (a librarian), who pleasures herself aboard the Armande Klockhammer Signature Model dildo (the only such product consented to during the "distinguished career" of the "famed male dancer at the Golden Banana") while giving water-sport instruction to teenaged lovers Kevin and Sylvie.

But back to Arno, an office temp in Boston endowed with the strange ability to stop time around him (a "fermata" is a musical term for a note or pause held at the performer's discretion). Baker's first-person novel is purportedly Arno's "autobiography," a loopy tale recounting his discovery and development of "the Fold" - as he usually calls the crease in time he enters at will.

Arno primarily employs the Fold to undress and examine women, especially women he wants to ask out but with whom he feels unsure of himself until he has exerted this odd power over them. Among contemporary novelists, perhaps only Nicholson Baker could adequately convey Arno's single-handed pursuit quite as engagingly.

"Of course he's a flawed person. He's doing things totally unacceptable, wrong and not to be tolerated for one second," Baker said yesterday during a brief trip to Seattle from his home in Berkeley. "The whole idea of `The Fermata' is that you can do these sneaky things without making anyone uncomfortable - but that's confusing, dangerous territory."

Detailed observations

The novel is also crammed with the same minutely detailed observations of mundane life that Baker used to such virtuosic effect in his first two novels, "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature." He can wax poetic on the contrast in texture and pattern on both sides of a Fieldcrest bath-towel label, just as he can meditate with mock profundity on the auditory variables in the urine streams produced by males and females.

But this is one novel, the lanky, 37-year-old Baker admits, that he isn't eager for his mother-in-law to read. After "Vox," his bestselling novel about phone sex (which she did read, and enjoy), "The Fermata" is a riper excursion into kinkiness that seems to both embarrass and exhilarate him - but it's an excursion he was determined to take.

"I realized at one point, why should I be denied the obligatory sexual phase that every American writer goes through. It's my turn, dammit," says Baker, sounding more than a little like the self-justifying Arno. "Each book is a getting rid of a piece of my life or my imagination - and it was time to get this one out."