The Mezzanine: A Social Commentary on the Mundanity of Corporate Office Life

    The Mezzanine follows the non-chronological stream of consciousness of the main character, Howie. As we travel up the escalator with Howie, we are transported to various tangents he takes to mediate the boredom and lack of ambition in his life. It appears that the most exciting plot point of this novel is the absolute lack of traditional plot in itself. This does not mean, however, that the novel is incapable of accomplishing anything noteworthy–satire, even. The Mezzanine seems to not rely on any overarching conflict or adventure to get a message across, but rather use the bleak nature of 1980s corporate office life as a foundation for Howie’s rampant inner monologue as he goes about his very ordinary life. The thing that transforms The Mezzanine into something interesting is Howie’s extreme relatability in the way his mind jumps from topic to topic, mapping out a mind that finds pleasure in a near-pleasureless place. I believe The Mezzanine presents corporate office life as an agonizingly mundane environment, using Howie’s constantly humming (yet familiar) mind as a way for the reader to realize that the only entertaining part of Howie’s painfully ordinary life is his never-ending train of thoughts.

    An example of Howie’s mind keeping him busy during a monotonous work day was when he became lost in his opinions on doorknobs. To summarize the page-and-a-half footnote required to maintain relative flow, Howie notes his annoyance of the vestigial suffix in doorknob is used to describe the device used to open doors; because according to Howie modernism has killed the antique doorknob and replaced it with “steel half-U handles” (Baker 27). He then goes on to describe the true doorknobs he grew up with in nostalgic detail, recalls his dad’s affection for draping his ties over them, and wraps up his train of thought by reflecting on how picking out nice ties became a source of bonding in between them. The reader is then plopped back into Howie’s main stream of consciousness (Baker 28). This extreme digression from an already busy thought process left me with the impression that Howie is very bored with his office life. In fact, throughout the entirety of this novel, it is never even specified what Howie worked as. Because it is quite difficult to not specify what exactly a main character is doing in the primary setting of a novel, I believe Nicholas Baker intentionally left out Howie’s official job title as a way to signal unbearable mundanity found in traditional office jobs. 

    One of the most illustrative passages that captures the suffocating nature of office life is Howie’s inner monologue about elevators. He described elevators as a “unique moment of true privacy–truer, in fact, than the privacy you get in the stall of a corporate bathroom because you can speak loudly and sing and not be overheard” (Baker 76). Howie goes on to describe the absurd behaviors he and L. exhibit in the privacy of these elevators, ranging from self-induced wardrobe malfunctions to acting like a wind-up toy. He then (in what I count as a humorous remark) mentions that you always know when to stop the act because of the elevator’s indicator light and feeling the elevator decelerate (Baker 76). This passage, while short, does so much to drive the point that the average workplace muffles your personality, to the point that it all comes rushing out at once the second you are provided with privacy. I believe the social commentary is achieved by tapping into the common experience of social exhaustion, showing how the continuous cycle of office niceties results in the build up of tamped down emotions that are deemed unprofessional. 

    To wrap up this idea of the unremarkable life in the office, I found Howie’s reaction to reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius very representative of the underlying social commentary throughout this novel. After reading “Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes,” Howie recoils, calling Aurelius’ assertion “Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue” (Baker 120). His visceral reaction to such an existential sentence suggests that he feels insecure as his uneventful life wastes away. This excerpt from Meditations gives a sobering outlook on life that challenges Howie’s tendency to stay in his own thoughts for enjoyment rather than accomplishing something great in life. 

Works Cited

    Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. Grove Press, 2010.