Nicholson bakers writing is inherently odd, writing a story about an escalator ride will in no way lend itself to a normal writing style. However Bakers oddities becomes glaringly obvious once you begin attempting to copy his style.
The one thing that really stood out to me was the lack of possessiveness. It's not that he doesn't use any possessiveness of any kind. He seems to use it only when he needs to emphasize that the object he has is unique to him i.e. my mom, my glasses. Take the first sentence, he immediately uses this lack of possession "At almost one o' clock I entered the lobby of the building where I work. The building isn't my workplace it's something he must enter, something larger than Howie.
Throughout the book you will see similar cases where Howie seems to be humbled by the objects around him. This plays a up a large amount of sympathy for Howie I feel, he constantly tries, throughout the course of the narrative, to explain the world around him through every anecdote he tells. Whether it's the intricacies of shoelaces or straws he's always fascinated with the subject matter. This I believe is the main reason most readers sympathize with Howie, rather than being an arrogant narrator explaining your everyday life to you, you have a doey eyed child running around and marveling at the beauty he finds within everyday life.
Pastiching Baker was quite an experience wither way, seeing the finer points of his writing really gives me a large amount of admiration for what he was able to do with The Mezzanine. You tell almost any other author to write a book on an experience as mundane as an escalator ride, and you'll get blank stares. Tell Baker and you'll get a book far too gripping for its subject matter.
