'It is 4.32am . . .'
A man gets up earlier and earlier each day, dresses in the dark, makes his coffee and lights the fire with a box of matches, also in the dark, feeling his way around, through his silent house, where wife and children sleep. And then he rummages through the thoughts that crowd his had and preoccupy him.
Meanwhile, outside, there's snow on the ground, Greta the duck is asleep in her dog kennel with a rug thrown over it, but that doesn't stop her bowl of water freezing each night. Here is mid-life man, domesticated but still an alien creature, whose thoughts veer brilliantly from love and marriage, to firelighters and suicide, from peeing in the dark to ant-farms, in the twinkling of an eye.
'A Box Of Matches' reveals Nicholson Baker at his obsessive-compulsive best, with humour and observation to die for, but with underlying truths about the ephemerality of life, the joy of small things, and darkness just the other side of everyday life - all human life in a box of matches. He knows how to get at the real meaning of "the examined life" and it's unmistakably serious - but also side-splittingly funny. This is virtuoso writing, idiosyncratic, brilliant, hilarious and touching.
