Room Temperature Book

As a writer and a parent, it's hard not to appreciate Room Temperature, Baker's fictionalized essay revolving around a 20-minute episode of rocking his daughter to sleep. It's also not hard to a little put off by it.

Reading it as a parent is a bit like listening to Charles Dobson, in that both seem intent on convincing you how perfect their families are within the bounds of the ideologies they live by. The fact the Dobson comes at it from a fundamentalist Christian angle while Baker follows the code of the educated elite is largely irrelevant; both leave you feeling a bit icky afterwards, knowing you'll NEVER be as a good a parent as they are.

It's obvious Baker loves his wife and child intensely, enough to write multiple pages on how his wife's massive pre- and post-natal ingestion of peanut butter translates into breast milk, which then translates "into the subtle gradients of flushes and blue shadows of my own daughter's face," and then to spend 10 more pages imagining a symphony he wants to write which starts to the thunderous smack of the conductor opening a sealed jar of Skippy. To anyone but him, though, it can't help feeling a bit self-indulgent to think this alone makes for interesting reading.

The writing itself, as with most of Baker's work, reminds me most of Eddie Van Halen's (or better, Steve Vai's) guitar work, in that when reading him (or listening to Van Halen or Vai) you can't really deny you're in the presence of genius, but you also get the feeling that both of them are more interested in showing off their chops than forming a lasting piece of work that an audience can connect to.

This is all to say that I appreciate, even at times like, Room Temperature. But even at 116 pages it's a bit of a slog waiting for pearls of transcendence amidst pages and pages of riffage.

(Let it be known that I wrote this entire review while rocking my own 6-month-old daughter in my lap. She didn't go to sleep.)