While reflecting on the Mezzanine recently I decided that Howie is one of my favorite narrators in fiction. His ability to spark your interest in the most trivial things is nothing short of remarkable, and his overall attitude is a welcome vacation from the more negative and pessimistic standard I’ve seen in this kind of novel. He’s a sweet character that is able to go through life seeing the simple wonder of things most people would overlook like straws, paper towels, and perforation.
Howie’s reaction to the line from Aurelius especially demonstrates why I like him. Aurelius claims that all of life is meaningless when you look at it with a certain perspective. Lives come and go without reason and when it’s all over you have nothing to show for it. When I first read this I was worried for a short moment that Howie might take this message to heart and enter an unhealthy and personality-changing depression, but luckily I didn’t have long to worry. Immediately Howie confronts this passage head on. In Howie’s eyes, not only is this outlook on life entirely untrue, it also seeks to ruin the sunny and curious outlook of people like him.
I’m very happy that Howie responded this way: refusing to let a pessimistic oversimplification ruin his almost unique outlook on the world. While reading this book, I initially expected it to follow the standard of a bright and idealistic young man entering the corporate world and becoming bitter and angry with the injustice that is business. Luckily, Howie was able to break the mold by entering this emotional and intellectual meat grinder and coming out the other side the same sweet and interesting fellow. It’s that fact that earns Howie the right to rank up there with Holden Caulfield and Jason Taylor as one of my most liked main characters in a novel.
Man, wouldn’t those three make an interesting group of friends?
1 comment:
You're right that Howie is a remarkably resilient character--he seems utterly immune to depression or modern alienation. He "breaks the mold" by maintaining somehow this constant state of wonderment in the corporate world, true, but it's also clear that he's probably not the best employee--he's missed his true calling, and should probably be a writer instead (as, indeed, he implies by referring to the writing of the "memoir" years after this lunch break, and indicating that he has since "left" this job). In a semester full of alienated and depressed protagonists, there is definitely something special about this narrator. (And you might enjoy other Baker books, since they all reflect a similar sensibility: _Room Temperature_ has a young father musing as he feeds his daughter a bottle; _U and I_ is a quirky memoir wherein Baker himself pays tribute to the novelist John Updike, while deliberately not rereading any Updike novels to prepare, quoting from memory, etc. Lots of footnotes and highly quirky.)
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