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Published on 5/7/08
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With Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker—best known as the author of voyeuristic metafiction works such as Vox and The Fermata—has shifted his attention to real-life international events, specifically the beginnings of World War II. But even with his historian’s hat on, Baker writes like a novelist, rejecting textbook straightforwardness for a pastiche—newspaper excerpts, speeches and brief bits of analysis—that slowly chips away at the romantic notion that WWII was a “just war.” Baker argues that the U.S.’s involvement in the conflict was not inevitable, and more a jingoistic product of Allied machinations than a response to unprovoked Axis aggression.
Targets of the author’s ire include President Roosevelt, who refused to increase the unofficial immigration quota for fleeing European Jews, and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. (Peace advocates such as novelist Stefan Zweig, on the other hand, shine with the courage of their convictions.) Winston Churchill, in particular, comes out looking worse for the wear. In one anecdote, the British PM discusses with Charles De Gaulle his impatience for the Germans to bomb English towns, because it “will cause such a wave of indignation in the United States that they’ll come into the war.”
Far from a tedious diatribe condemning the horrors of war, Human Smoke is disturbing but not in an obtrusive way: It quietly lets the reader judge historical figures by their own words. This approach is convincing, though its scope is somewhat restricted: Because the book ends in 1941, it skirts the Holocaust, only hinting at its growing menace. Still, with his unconventional structure and crystalline prose, Baker manages to make what could easily be just another history book into anything but.
—Drew Toal
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