The Everlasting Story of Nory
By Nicholson Baker
Random House, 226 pages, $22
Nine-year-old Eleanor Winslow (Nory for short) is an observant American child living in England, where there is much to observe — dwarf cauliflower, for example. “It wouldn’t be called dwarf food in America,” Nory explains, “because that would hurt the feelings of a real dwarf, who would feel not too pleased about being compared to a vegetable.” Then there is Prior Rowland, the founder of Nory’s school, who is so called “because he lived prior to Henry the Eighth.”
“The Everlasting Story of Nory,” Nicholson Baker’s latest novel, views Nory’s family, school, friendships and dreams through her 9-year-old lens, and the resulting distortions are frequently hilarious. They are also accurate. Anybody who has been or known a Nory will recognize the world that Baker has created, a world in which imagination still gets the better of its new roommate, reason.
Nory acknowledges, for instance, that her 2-year-old brother, Frank (known as “Littleguy”), has his own flawed view of reality. “To Littleguy `long ago’ and `early this morning’ meant pretty much the same thing,” Nory explains, “because his head was still basically a construction site, filled with diggers and dumpers driving around in mushy dirt, and it was hard for him to tell what were the real outlines of his ideas.” Littleguy consequently introduces himself to strangers by saying, “Hello, I’m shy.”
Nory, on the other hand, has definite ideas — about dentistry and Antarctica, among other things. Her rational powers are still competing, however, with her nightmares and her fantasies. “Some were definitely on the gruesome side,” Nory admits of one of her stories, “Everlasting Life of Mariana,” in which the heroine is disfigured by burning rain.
Despite her efforts, Nory’s attempts at analysis are repeatedly hijacked by her bizarre speculations. Her examination of the term “fatal flaw,” for instance, leads her to think about “final straw,” which leads her to contemplate the mistreatment of camels.
Nicholson Baker dedicates this novel to his daughter, “the informant.” But “The Everlasting Story of Nory” is far more than a doting father’s notebook of anecdotes. It is a map of the 9-year-old mind. Here lunch break is a treacherous crossroads and bedtime a minefield: “. . .if you wake up in the middle of an awful dream that is quite powerful and you go back to sleep too soon, the dream will heal over the cut you made in it and will finish itself,” Nory warns. The only reliable antidote to a nightmare is a good story, a remedy that Nory’s father endorses by “writing books that help people go to sleep.” Her mother’s job, in Nory’s well-ordered world, is to teach her children “to be honest and not hurt people’s feelings.”
The novel centers on Nory’s friendship with the unpopular and bullied Pamela, and this is where a false note of adult sanctimony might have crept into the 9-year-old’s voice. But Baker keeps the drama child-sized and the sentiment at bay as he captures the intensity and fragility of shifting childhood alliances.