![]() Some were crisp depictions of moments in the text. I became a connoisseur of those covers, and of the often surreal illustrations at their centers. Joy Williams’s “ Taking Care,” a collection of incongruities, a rabbit on a tropical beach staring at a snow-covered palm tree. Susanna Kaysen’s “ Asa, As I Knew Him,” featuring a dejected angel, head in hands, sitting on a diving board at a swimming pool’s edge. ![]() Jay McInerney’s “ Bright Lights, Big City,” with its jacketed man, the Twin Towers, the lurid neon of the Odeon. And as I picked them up, I marvelled at their covers, which seemed to me impossibly sophisticated. They were easy to find in the library, because their spines matched “The Mezzanine” ’s: the Vintage orb, last name in a color block, title with drop shadows-all in the same blocky font. I began seeking out other books in the same line. Underneath the logo were two words in perfectly justified type: “Vintage Contemporaries.” Floating at the top of the list was an unusual logo, a hovering 3-D orb casting a shadow over a parallelogram. On the last page of the paperback was a list of other books, most of which I had never heard of. I wrestled with the novel’s deceptively slow pace-it takes place on a single ride up an office escalator, but really it’s set inside the human mind, as it asks questions, produces hypotheses, and makes connections with neuronic quickness. ![]() Nicholson Baker’s 1986 novel “ The Mezzanine” looked like no other book I’d ever seen, and it read like no other book I’d ever read. I was searching for books that felt older than I was. ![]() I was fifteen when I first saw that image, working my way through the fiction section of my home-town library in suburban Wisconsin. At its top the escalator disappears into an enormous paper bag, which contains a bendy straw, a bow tie, a pint of milk, and huge kernels of popcorn. A suited man rides an escalator into the sky. ![]()
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