Scenes From the Mall of America

Nicholson Baker, the great novelist, essayist, and observer of the world’s absurdities, produces much of his work when he’s out in that world: He likes to do his writing, Baker has told interviewers, , and , and . This is one more way that Baker mocks a culture that is so eager to lionize the literary: Writing, he makes clear in the venues he chooses for it, is in practice not at all glamorous. It involves, often,-fueled fugues brought on in the corner booth at the . There’s a reason you don’t see Colin Firth actually doing much writing in his French isolation-cottage in : Writing—the act of it, the labor of it—is, generally speaking, exceedingly dull.