On the surface, the novel deals with a man's lunchtime trip up an escalator in the mezzanine of the office building where he works (a building based on Baker's recollections of Rochester's Midtown Plaza). The substance of the novel, however, is taken up with the thoughts that run through a person's mind in any given few moments, and the ideas that might result if they were given the time to think these thoughts through to their conclusions. The Mezzanine tells this story through the extensive use of footnotes—some of them comprising the bulk of the page—as the narrator travels through his own mind and past. The footnotes are quite detailed and sometimes diverge into multiple levels of abstraction. Near the end of the book, there is a multi-page footnote on the subject of footnotes themselves.
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