What Is The Irony Of The Mezzanine

In Perchance to Dream, Franzen writes about his struggle to “engage with the culture” in his writings and subsequently ends up “torturing” his story by overloading it with every possible social issue, yet Baker produces an culturally engaging novel seemingly effortlessly, without agonizing over the need to incorporate and satirize dozens of social ills. However, what is meant by ‘cultural engagement’ and the standards for achieving such a lofty goal are under debate.

Simmons describes The Mezzanine as being so exclusively personal and mundane “that any larger historical frame…is gestured at only through the irony of its absence.” Other critics have diagnosed Baker’s writing in The Mezzanine with ‘descriptivitis,’ regarding Baker’s digressions as a “general clogging or stalling” in which "one thing leads, not to an end, but to another." And many have lamented The Mezzanine’s lack of plot, character development, and emotional interplay, three features that usually distinguish great stories, yet the beauty of the

I whole heartedly agree with Howie- when are the holidays honoring the dead greats in the field or perforation? Why isn’t Richard Drew, the inventor of transparent adhesive tape a household name? Why are these men of unpretentious inventions so often overlooked in our culture? As O’Connell says, “the point is that such innovations do make an appreciable difference in our lives, and, it might further be argued, a much greater difference to the average person’s life than the type of enterprise for which festschrift volumes are typically the