I just read some reviews of a new book called “A Box of Matches” by Nicholson Baker. In a way, the book is a lot like most blogs — basically a lot of rambling about nothing, just the details of daily life with some occasional insights thrown in. As with most things on the Internet, however, the blogs belong mainly to the younger generation, while “Box of Matches” is the voice of an aging Baby Boomer. The major book reviewers (in the New York Times, Atlantic Magazine, Washington Post, Salon, etc.) have taken “BOM” quite seriously despite its lightweight content, e.g., a pet duck named Gertrude, a piece of lint found in narrator Emmitt’s navel, changes over the years in the patterns used on paper towels, etc. Some of the reviewers even seem a bit haunted by the book. And I think I know why, given that I’m in the same boat, the S.S. Mid-Life Crisis.

Unlike Emmett the narrator, I’m not married (divorced), don’t have a house, don’t have kids, don’t have a duck, and never saw lint in my navel. And yet, as with Emmett, I have an education, an unexciting semi-professional job, and a life that is more than half gone with nothing all that much to show for it. Emmett tries to focus on the little things and keeps on telling us how nice they are, but you know it’s mostly bogus because he also admits to suicidal fantasies and a lingering feeling that life is just passing him by. The book is divided into 33 chapters based upon the contents of a matchbox, one match for each morning when Emmett gets up early and starts the fireplace in his living room. And then the matches run out and the book just ends, without any hint of resolution. Talk about life as quiet desperation. One day it’s just over.

(SIDENOTE: With the wintertime blues and the Orange Alert, I was getting up myself around 3 am every day for about 30 days, ruminating in the dark over the meaning and meaninglessness of life. Wonder if I could write a book about it?)

Ten or twenty years ago, BOM wouldn’t have made it much farther then the junior manuscript editor’s REJECT stamp. And ten years from now it will probably be forgotten. But right now, there’s an opportunity to hit the nerves of the many graying Baby Boomers who are getting a little scared. What happened to the great expectations of our youth? What happened to all the campus protests and the Age of Aquarius and the song lyrics by Crosby, Stills and Nash, i.e. “we can change the world, rearrange the world”? Did we really think that we could put an end to war, that Vietnam would be the last? How many wars have we been involved in since then? (Looks like the next big one in Iraq is just about to get going).

Ah, we were a generation that dared to dream big in our youth. And thus we’re now getting disappointed big time in our old age. We thought that greatness was everyone’s birthright. But once the dust settled, we found out that only maybe one in ten were going to do something really interesting and engrossing, like being an astronaut or a major league baseball player or a senator or a movie producer or the founder of a high-tech company or an astrophysicist who helped to discover dark energy and the universe’s acceleration. To some degree, those who did make it were the best and the brightest, but to a larger degree they were just plain lucky. The rest of us have to make our peace with getting by, with bringing up kids and keeping our flower gardens and listening to our primary care physicians and seeing a movie during the weekend and changing our socks when they get holes in them (one of Emmett’s major themes). And reading books that describe boxes of matches.

Most of the reviewers of BOM just don’t seem honest. They just don’t say what I think we really want to say in response to it. Which is this: “rage, rage against the dying of the light; do not go gentle into that good night” (Dylan Thomas, of course, who died in the year I was born).