Need something to do while snowed in, in bed with the flu, sore from shoveling, or just damn tired of people nostalgically recalling the winters of their youth? Read The Apartment, a short novel (perhaps a novella) by Greg Baxter.

I’ve read lots of “big books” this year. Just finished Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Was tackled by William Gass’ Middle C. Spent late autumn with Murakami’s The Painted Bird Chronicles. Have Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things teed up on my nightstand. After starting the new year reading The Apartment, I plead temporary sanity after torturing myself all year.

Not really. I love reading big books. I admire the author’s effort to put his/her Brontosaurus footprint smack in the middle of the literary circle, even if I don’t care for the work, or in some cases even understand the work, how the hell it got published in the first place, other than legacy academic fawning over established and known quantities and guaranteed level of sales.

But a small, quiet book hidden like an improvised explosive device, packing as much potential energy, but mercifully, does not need to detonate to pack its punch – that’s refreshing. Here’s an author with no need to create multi-dimensional fiction that can only be analyzed with tensors of mathematical matrices, no sentence acrobatics worthy of Blue Man Group, and no complex aromas masking the meat and potatoes of genre.

Over a time line of less than 24 hours, a 40-something Iraq War Veteran American citizen looking for an apartment in an unnamed European city with a female companion on a blustery snowy day delivers a subtle, poignant incision into America’s place in the contemporary European world. That’s it. But it’ll take the legs right out from under you.

Context is everything. I read one of the funniest books ever on divorce (A M Homes’ Music for Torching) when some good friends were going through their, often from my vantage point, comical separation. I still cherish A Catcher in the Rye because I sat on the benches of a boys private preparatory academy and longed for the balls to sneak out and do something, anything, like what Holden Caulfield did.

I read The Apartment during an all-day snowstorm. I’ve spent time in European cities like Baxter’s setting. I often find myself in a frame of mind similar to the narrator of The Apartment. Give it up. Blend into the background of a place you stand out in simply because of your nationality. Cut your ties. Drink in bars where no one knows your name – or speaks your language. Float through each day. I don’t deny that it was a book in synch with my psyche at time of reading.

Following Pynchon’s 500 page Bleeding Edge of post 9/11, post dot com bust, deep Internet sewers of conspiracies, corporate malfeasance, and shadowy tech exec yanking on the marionettes, wrapped in a detective genre (modernized for contemporary readers with a Jewish female New Yorker accounting sleuth for a private dick), well, all I can say is, Thank God for the randomness of finding Baxter on the “What’s New” shelves of my local library. An author who plays a human being, not a god who won’t even pose for a photograph.

Apartment hunting probably will never be this riveting in my lifetime.

Dare I say it? I hope Baxter takes his shot at the Brontosaurus circle.