The foundation of A Box Of Matches couldn't be simpler or less novelistic: Each morning, Emmett, a middle-aged textbook editor, wakes up early, builds a fire, makes coffee, stares at flames, and thumbs through a jumble of thoughts that range from moderately compelling to not particularly interesting. Throw in a few tender tracings of family dynamics and a pet duck living in the backyard, and all the pieces are in place for a slim novel that trades its modest means for a similarly modest payoff. Author Nicholson Baker made his name with smallness-celebrating novels like The Mezzanine (as well as the newspaper-conservation treatise Double Fold), but A Box Of Matches rarely reaches the quiet majesty to which it aspires. Every chapter begins with a variation on "Good morning, it's 4:17 a.m."; from there, the diary-like passages stretch into daringly insignificant topics like hole-strewn socks, the preferred method for chewing apples, helpful tips for washing dishes, and the evolution of paper-towel designs. The book's digressive nature starts off winningly enough, and self-absorbed Emmett does have his charms. But a uniform tone derived from early-morning gauziness proves more aggravating than hypnotic. As the novel's only true character, Emmett amounts to little more than the sum of his mental wanderings. Gazing into his fireplace's "orangey ember-cavern that resembles a monster's mouth," he flits between the boredom and thrill of a life lived unassumingly. Little things and big things get equal shrift in a mix of memories and of-the-moment sensations, such that watching his toes react to a dropped bar of soap proves just as moving as anecdotes about his young son's wide-eyed charm. Baker has a field day with subtle movements and writerly precision, waking up and feeling "for my glasses on the bedside table in the tender way one uses for glasses, as if one's fingers are antennae." But the cumulative effect of a book in which the creeping onset of the flu passes for drama proves more than a little quaint and corny. Like its title, A Box Of Matches comprises periodic flashes and fizzles in its slow, time-haunted march toward depletion. But few of Baker's meditations strike hot enough to simmer beyond the warmth of a yawning writerly exercise.