THE FERMATA

Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."--San Francisco Chronicle.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Baker follows his surprise bestseller, Vox , with a novel once again filled with elaborate sexual fantasies. The "fermata" of the title refers to the fold in time that narrator Arno Strine can induce; this allows him to stop the flow of events around him and proceed in his own fashion to undress unsuspecting women. The 35-year-old Strine, appropriately enough, works as a "temp" in Boston, moving in and out of various office situations, completing his business and then disappearing. Despite his questionable ethics while "in the fold"--fondling women's breasts, going through their pocketbooks, writing erotic marginalia in the books they are browsing, stopping their cars and replacing their music cassettes with ones containing his own pornographic compositions--Strine is blithely confident that, since he means no ill will, he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite Baker's vaunted object fetishism, which in all his books registers as an unparalleled gift for description, he once again fails to find a novelistic context that would lend his art any lasting resonance. The sexual escapades here--a lonely woman's fascination with sexual toys strapped to a riding lawnmower; a laboratory investigation of the role masturbation might play in Strine's carpal tunnel problem--border on the ludicrous, however titillating. Still, many Vox readers will flock to this erudite smut even as Baker stalls in his campaign to eventually succeed Updike as America's most polished stylist.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The talented Baker returns with sex for sophisticates, making Vox (1992) seem like a warmup exercise. A 35-year-old office temp and grad-school dropout, Arno Stine has the ability to stop the flow of time--a talent he discovered when he had a case for his fourth-grade teacher ``and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on.'' Which he did, by switching on a toy transformer and, when everything around him was struck into a time- frozen motionlessness, taking off his own clothes and a pretty good number of Miss Dobzhansky's. Ever since, he's been doing what he calls the ``Drop,'' putting the entire universe on pause and dropping into the ``fold'' or the ``fermata,'' pretty much at will, by flicking a switch, pushing his glasses up, or snapping his fingers. And what does he do when everything except himself goes on hold (and even the raindrops stop falling)? Well, mainly he masturbates--and masturbates and masturbates--often with, or near, or onto, women whom, under cover of the time-freeze, he's disrobed, or followed home, or in one ingenious way or another aroused with an aim to observing them (and joining them, separate and unseen) in orgasm. Arno considers himself harmless, tenderhearted, sensitive, even considerate (he's fond of ``giving'' sex toys to women, who'll never know where they came from), but to the reader he's--well, a one-note symphony, indisputably a gifted stylist (he's writing--as you read it--his autobiography), but psychologically pretty much skin (and more skin and more skin) deep. Arno Stine is, by and large, more interesting to watch than listen to. The metaphor of time-stop as art-power, and art-power as sex- power, has its allure. But drama is drama and porn porn, this among the most literary-respectable of the latter that money can buy. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

For a musician, the term fermata means the prolongation of a particular note beyond the time indicated in the score. For Arno Strine it is a period during which he remains active while the rest of the world is paused and insentient. Strine discovered his powers of "chronomaly" as early as the fourth grade, and since that time he has used them mainly to undress static women and pursue very private sexual delights. Now writing his autobiography, Strine confronts problems of linear narration much like those of Tristram Shandy. As in his last novel, Vox ( LJ 11/15/91), Baker provides sexually explicit scenarios but displays characters who remain isolated and distant. Readers who are not overwhelmed by graphic episodes of inventive sex should appreciate Baker's witty comedy and his unconventional exploration of the nature of time.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Tech . Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Were not the subject of Baker's novel pornography, one would speak without hesitation of its delicious wit. On the other hand, this is the story of a 35-year-old man who, by snapping his fingers or by resorting to some more desperate measure (for example, turning on a rubber-band stretching machine built by a woman at MIT), can and does stop time for the mere pleasure of taking sexual advantage of the women around him. Sounds sick, doesn't it? Well, get over it and you will find yourself in one of the funniest and most inventive books you've read for a long time. For the nice thing about our hero--and this is what subverts our own values as well as his--is that he is really a rather sensitive and even tender young man. For instance, he has no intention of embarrassing the women whose lives he explores and whose bodies he undresses. He would certainly never undress a woman he did not think he could put back together so precisely that even she will not notice. And anyway, what is most delighful is not this sexual naughtiness but the guiltless pleasure the hero takes in all the sensual data of life: the way chalk rubs against the blackboard, the way a voice sounds on a dictaphone machine, the noise a ball bearing makes when shaken in a can of paint. Baker knows all this can lead to something dangerous and corrupt, but his hero is not only playful, kind (he gives away a brand-new dildo to a woman he will never see and will never know him); in his own way he is also very moral. This last point is tricky. We see that our hero refuses to take money in the periods he freezes time and he is delicately prudish ("`Panties' is a word to be avoided, I feel"). So what do we have here? Let every reader decide for themselves. All we will say here is that Baker can be very funny and that, perverse or not, he certainly knows how to write. Stuart Whitwell