Nicholson Baker’s novel “A Box of Matches” is about a middle age family man named Emmett who decides to get up early every morning while everyone else is sleeping, light a fire, and think about life. Baker takes the reader through the intimate thoughts of Emmett with incredible detail. Emmett resolves to get up early every morning because he feels that he is passing through life without truly seeing it. It is also inferred that Emmett is suffering from a middle age crisis. Every chapter starts with Emmett waking and saying, “Good Morning” and announcing what time it is as he lights a fire with a match from the matchbox. Emmett lives in New England with his wife, two children, and pet duck. Sprinkled throughout this novel among the more routine thoughts of Emmett are his serious reflections about the meaning of life, the passage of time, and the mystery of death that seem to be brought on by this self-induced crisis. Emmett takes the 32 days of the novel, which coincide with 32 matches in the matchbox, to review his life, come to terms with his age, past regrets, and the inevitability of death.
Most of Emmett’s musings are not deep thoughts. One morning his thoughts are entirely devoted to his sleep being interrupted by a sock with a toe-hole in it and complained, “at night the edges of the hole come alive.” In another, he explains the intricacies of peeing in the dark early in the morning. Once in a while the reader catches a moment where it seems that Emmett is having trouble with his age. He does not reference any other problem that would have him as stressed as he seems to be. It seems he is under stress because he has to pull out his old suicide fantasies to get to sleep one night. Emmett explained that he used suicide fantasies in the past to get to sleep when he was having a hard time with work and believed “It would be so much easier to die than to get those three contentious doctors to contribute their material for the new and heavily revised edition” (22). Emmett is not a suicidal person but uses these fantasies as an escape. His growing children are a constant reminder that he is getting older. “Incredible: I’m forty-four years old” states Emmett. He says this while thinking about his own father and how old he was when Emmett left home. “What did it feel like to lose me?” he wonders. Emmett also sees a reminder of his age in the mirror. He says, “I am not at all content with my beard,” in the middle of a sentence about his children being practically grown. He shaved it off last year because it had too much white in it.
Emmett has determined not to miss the important things in his life. This brings to his mind his regrets about the past. He runs all of the relationships in his life through his mind. In the early morning darkness he reminisces about meeting his wife, Claire. He has no regrets about his wife, Claire. He proudly states, “More than half my life I have loved her. Think of that” (30). His thoughts drift to his father and he reminisces about the notes his father used to leave for him when they lived together, and he states, “I wish I had every note my father ever wrote me” (80). He regrets making his mother cry. He left her rug out on the porch because he wanted to show it off to the neighborhood and it ended up getting stolen. He ponders on the book he was planning on writing his son called "The Young Sponge". He regrets that “Nickelodeon had acted; [he] had only planned to act” (103). Emmett finds himself falling short in his expectations of himself during this self examination and inventory of his life. He compares himself to people and even animals that he admires. He attributes hero-like qualities to Greta their duck, admiring her ability to withstand the frigid New England winter. He also admires Fidel the ant who “became the sole representative of his civilization” after all of the other ants had passed away. Emmett kept the ant farm for two years after Fidel had died. It disturbed him that “the legacy of tunnels” had been erased when the family moved. Emmett recalls a movie where a cowboy hero bravely pushes an arrow all the way through his body and compares this to his own life. He said, “Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I’ve just ridden my tricycle, gone to school, greased my bicycle bearings, gotten a job, gotten married, had children, and here I am” (149). What Emmett really wants is to save the world. Emmett is very refreshing. He has an enormous capacity to love and sees beauty in things that are usually taken for granted.
Parts of Emmett’s morning musings are about death. He compares death to the leaves falling off the trees in the winter. He exclaims, “All those leaves were up there firmly attached to the trees, and they’re gone.” Emmett claims, “It’s like death, which is also getting harder and harder for me to understand” (34). Emmett reminisces about his grandfather, grandmother, father, mother and even a neighbor who has died. It is obvious that he is puzzled with the concept of death and dying. Emmett also compares the logs in the fire to the years of life. “All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn” (104). Emmett’s thoughts of death are random and sprinkled among reflections that are very amusing to the reader. Finding “another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint collector” is one of the more amusing little comments that lighten the tone of Emmett’s 32 day self-examination and thoughts of death.
As Emmett’s box of matches runs out his thoughts turn more towards an attitude of acceptance. He thinks of himself as a tire spinning in the snow. “The tire wants to spin its own grave” (175). He explains how to rock the car from drive to reverse to get the tire out of the hole that it has created and the wild joy that follows. The last match finds Emmett thinking of the best things in his life, his thoughts of Claire. Simple things that she has said or done that most people would not even remember. The way she turned pages with her tongue when nursing their baby, and the way she pointed at mist coming off of a yield sign in a field. Emmett’s thoughts are happy as he makes his way back to bed with his wife, his mind at peace and his crisis over. |
