Nicholson Baker’s use of the appropriate words at the right time are unfailingly satisfying and frequently hilarious.Margaret Brentano
So strongly does Nicholson Baker evoke the experience of substitute teaching in his new 700-page tome that closing the book feels like making a panting escape from the classroom. The head rings with noise. What madness, you think. How does anyone get by in there? How does anyone learn?
Substitute is a rare thing, a book that takes a close look at youth culture and the education system but is not a polemic – it feels, instead, like an immersion. As if Baker, having experienced the ways in which schools bludgeon their charges with learning, has deliberately chosen not to do the same here. He began subbing simply "to know what life in classrooms was really like" and this is what the book conveys. The end result is surprisingly exhilarating.
In this era of hot takes and think pieces, it's strange to read something so apparently meandering – the appeal of a book such as this might end up resting partly on its stylistic contrarianism. Because he is assigned to a different grade and sometimes different schools every time, there is no narrative continuity. No one idea pulls the reader through. You are in the morass with him and with the "thousands" of students of the book's subtitle.
A few people, when I explained Substitute to them, mentioned Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose plotless and exhaustively detailed fictional autobiography was a global bestseller, but Baker is more compassionate, more curious and more attuned to the absurd.
Although his oeuvre is wide-ranging, Baker has always been a details man. His semi-autobiographical works The Mezzanine and Room Temperature are about, respectively, buying shoelaces on a lunch hour and feeding a baby. The books' charm comes from a combination of Baker's absorption in minutiae and his delightful authorial voice. Although his prose has changed over the years – he has become less "sesquipedalian," as he once self-mockingly described himself, his clauses fewer and less dependent, and his interests broader – still his deployment of mots justes remains unfailingly satisfying and frequently hilarious. A student in Substitute is described as "coughing juicily" on him. He has a sommelier's feel for the quality of the noise in the classrooms – it is described as attaining a "chewy" quality at one point; at another, it has the consistency of "orange marmalade." In the cafeteria, he writes, "the sound of children rose to a full riot-gear fluffernutter death-metal maelstrom."
Besides noise, other items notable for their ubiquity in Substitute include iPads, worksheets, Jolly Ranchers, student requests to go to the bathroom, student requests to work in the hall and signs hung on the wall listing "taxonomies of educational objectives." Baker, who mentions in the preface that he has had an alternative-school education, undoubtedly has feelings about all these things, but mostly he just wants to hear from students about what they feel. Why do they think they hate school? Is it necessarily hateful or could it be improved?
The students don't always have an answer for this. But the reader can begin to guess why; the author needn't editorialize. Still, even though he's not making a broad, defined argument, he does track his occasional frustrations. The classes in Substitute are not without utility – well, most of them – but it is easy to see how capable children who are not suited for the environment are confused, thwarted, punished and finally end up disengaged. (And all this incidental to the vicissitudes of certain teachers' personalities – haranguing, interrupting, punitive – and the cumulative effects of the tiny injustices their students sustain.)
One of the times when Baker's opinions break into the captain's log is around issues of pathologization and medication. "I'm ADHD," one especially annoying eighth-grader says by way of excusing his behaviour. "My pills begin to wear off around now." "Oh, come on," Baker says. It's complicated terrain: Are kids really "mentally ill" or just in entirely the wrong environment? Does labelling and medicating them deny them a necessary sense of agency? Another kid, Waylon, takes an adult's dose of Paxil, which probably causes more problems than it solves.
Indirectly, the book is asking the question: What if the conventional education system is not just boring at its worst, but actually harmful for some kids? In another class, the kids are supposed to be tending to their own mental health, setting a "stress-reduction goal" as homework, the irony of which is chirpily noted by a teacher who says, "Don't let making a plan to manage your stress stress you out." There has to be a better way, but the question of what that might be is left in the reader's hands.
Contrasted with the often generic and depersonalized nature of the daily grind, the chaos endemic to the classrooms feels cheering and sustaining, somehow. Signs of life, of hope. Descriptive asides of kids' feral behaviour – a girl putting her own tongue in a tiny noose, a guy screwing a bottle of mango juice against his closed eye – made me cackle maniacally. Dialogue pops with non sequiturs and constantly veers off in absurd directions.
Once in a while, the surreality coalesces into something magic, something approaching a metaphor that hints at the glorious madness, struggle and possibility of those strange, raw years. "Then they put on a beautiful John Legend song, All of Me," Baker writes. "They boosted the volume by putting the iPhone in a plastic cereal bowl and began singing along: My head's underwater, but I'm breathing fire! They moved their heads and held their arms out and swayed. You're crazy, and I'm out of my mind! They carried the bowl full of music away with them."
Lisan Jutras is an editor with The Globe and Mail.