Books like The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

What happened to Nicholson Baker, I wonder? The earliest pieces collected in The Size of Thoughts are so dazzling that, when I first dipped into them, I nearly fell off my barstool. (Okay, it was actually a food court stool, but still, I was all set to jab my plastic fork in my chest out of sheer, dyspeptic envy). Written for The Atlantic Monthly when Baker was still in his mid-twenties (bastard), these early pieces are exquisite little riffs on philosophical themes: the concept of rarity, the process of changing one’s mind etc. They’re the type of stylish, whimsical things a modern-day Lamb might write – assuming he were funny and, um, not dull.So the young Baker is a pretty cool guy, if coolness is compatible with extreme bookishness (and I kind of hope it is). But then, about halfway through the Reagan administration, Baker changes course. He gives up his funky, downtown loft and moves out to the literary suburbs, where he loses himself in harmless, married-guy enthusiasms: model airplanes, film projectors, the manufacture of nail clippers (I shit you not). He’s still a genius, mind you, but he’s a genius in sandals and knee-high socks, watering his perfectly manicured lawn… That’s not to say there isn’t some good stuff even in the most obsessive and geeked-out of the later essays. I appreciate his fealty to the commonplace, his loving attention to the homely hardware of modern life. And nobody, but nobody, can describe complex industrial processes with Baker’s degree of oddly poetic exactitude (granted, nobody else would even want to). What’s missing here is just that drop of youthful insolence you find in the early writings, where he had the audacity to be brilliant and precious and skewed, all at the same time. The grown-up Baker is more responsible, and a few shades less purple, than his younger self, but he’s also that much less charming. And I’ve got to say I miss the insufferable prick.