Nicholson Baker: Why Not

Nicholson Baker is the author of The Size of Thoughts (Random House), and of The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, U and I, Vox, The Fermata (all published by Vintage).

Tracy Quan: Do people confide in you a lot about their affairs?

Nicholson Baker: I love gossip, I have a huge appetite for it and I do get confided in but mostly it's basic sexual confessions. I don't seem to be a magnet for people who are going through an experience with infidelity -- I guess because I haven't written about it. My education about adultery really came about through reading John Updike. One of his stories is Your Lover Just Called. There's a lot of novelty and knowledge in that title. Both partners know what's going on, and it isn't something they're cheerful about. Updike, I think, is the great chronicler of how relationships and marriages continue to accommodate infidelity, and then either break up -- or something gets solved. But I find some of those Updike stories almost too painful to read.

TQ: Why?

NB: It blows my mind that people are so willing to screw up their lives. I know someone who is going through marital difficulties and he has this yearning for affairs. He's trying to solve problems that have nothing to do with his marriage or sex life, by changing things that are within his power. I was listening to myself talking to this guy, and thinking: "I sound ridiculously -- like some sort of Sunday school/grandmother type of person." But hey, maybe the advice of Sunday school/grandmother types is sometimes worth heeding.

TQ: Has religion played a big role in your view of cheating?

NB: Not that I know of. There's Quakerism on my mother's side -- we were lapsed Quakers. I went to a somewhat Quaker college in Pennsylvania called Haverford where there was a strong notion that you weren't supposed to cheat on tests, but adultery did not come up a lot. I'm 39, so I lived through the dissolution of my parents' marriage and the marriages of my friends' parents. There must have been affairs behind those divorces that we, as kids, weren't aware of, and maybe my generation is having a reaction to this explosion of divorce. Based on the novelistic evidence that Updike offers, infidelity doesn't seem to result in his characters being happier -- though maybe they're sadder and wiser. That's the nice thing about novels. They teach us what we might otherwise have to learn the hard way.

TQ: How accurate a guide is the novel?

NB: I've read that 1974 is the mysterious year when American productivity went into a decline, and people have come up with all these explanations. But I think of the sexual revolution and the distractions for that group of people -- who were married with jobs and having affairs -- suddenly having to keep a whole set of other things in their minds, about affairs. Their jobs suffered. That's a standard novelistic moment. As soon as people are in an affair, everything starts falling apart at work. They can't keep their eye on what they're supposed to be doing. It's like people who lose several weeks of their life to the Internet when they start messing around with the Web or Usenet or chat rooms. In adultery, it's roughly the same, I would guess, though on a larger scale the same -- dropping into a hole for a month or two, and then suddenly thinking: "What have I done to my life?"