The Mezzanine: A Novel
Nicholson Baker
 On the surface it deals with a man's lunch-time trip up an escalator in the mezzanine of the office building where he is employed, a building based on Baker's recollections of Rochester's Midtown Plaza. In reality, it deals with all the thoughts that run through a person's minds in any given few moments if he or she were given the time to think them through to their conclusions. The Mezzanine does that through extensive use of footnotes, some making up the bulk of the page, travelling inside a human mind, through the thinker's past. The footnotes occasionally are detailed and rambling to the point of Baker consciously digressing within the footnote; and towards the end of the book there is a multi-page footnote on the subject of footnotes themselves.