Nicholson Baker has established in his previous books that he is a paradoxical writer: academic yet adolescent, fantastical yet exacting, graceful yet long-winded, self-obsessed yet sharply observant. His work demands not only a reader's full attention but also his indulgence; one must follow behind Baker's cart wheeling logic in the hope that it will all lead somewhere -- and amuse along the way. More often than not, he succeeds at both.
Given such a demanding style, it's hardly surprising that The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays, some previously published, some new, is a mixed bag. The haute-horniness Baker coined in Vox and The Fermata is absent here, but the more subtle subtext of that mood -- a hyper intimacy with a subject, an endless ability to fantasize -- pervade The Size of Thoughts. Certain essays, particularly "Changes of Mind," "Rarity" and "Reading Aloud" show off Baker's ability to ensnare a complex concept, and with technically precise language, haul it into the light and study it from every angle.
Other essays fall short. In "Clip Art" and "Model Airplanes" Baker elevates the mundane through intellectual inquiry (he describes a drop of glue as having a "distilled, vodkal interior purity"), but so much clever wordplay eventually slows down the reader and begs the question "Why do I need to know this much about anything?"
"Lumber," the book's final section, proves once and for all, in Bakerian logic, just how much heft one word can be made to carry. Baker writes: "The mind has been called a lumber-room, and its contents or its printed products described as lumber. . ." From there, he explores the boundaries, in mind-bending detail (he uses everything from a CD-ROM compilation of the "English Poetry Full-Text Database" to John Wesley's letters), of one word and the process of thinking itself. This is Baker at his most scholarly, and some might argue, didactic. But there isn't another writer alive with Baker's zoom-lens capabilities, infinite attention span, devilish insight and tactile vocabulary. For anyone with a speck of curiosity -- and a little patience -- The Size of Thoughts is well worth lumbering through. -- Salon
Showing off Baker's Sears catalog eclecticism and word-playfulness, this collection is congenial kin to his thoughtful, fiddly novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature rather than the garrulously oversexed Vox.
These essays and other "lumber" (in its English sense) show off Baker's ideas of scale and subject matter, loosely categorized under rubrics the likes of "Thought," "Machinery," and "Library Science." In Baker's fastidiously discursive approach, the more obscure or minute the subject—such as model airplanes, nail clippers, punctuation marks, slang terminology, or typos—the longer and deeper he goes. His entertaining piece on the movie projector focuses on the transition from reel-to-reel projectors to the modern oversized platter systems, then zooms in on the crucial Maltese cross, the tiny, remarkably precise moving part that drives both. In a lighter study he deciphers and itemizes the books used by upscale furniture companies as props in their mail-order catalogs. An article on the history of punctuation fixes such picayune marks as the ancient cryphia or the medieval pilcrow within the history of Western writing. The collection's two longest pieces reveal the tensions and complements of his antiquarianism and gadget-mania: respectively, cyberspace's on-line library catalogs and the etymology and literary history of the word lumber. In the former, Baker sometimes loses his perspective in the debate over card catalogs versus Boolean-search-driven databases, jumbling nostalgia and practicality. The latter is, at 140 pages, an indulgent tour de force, and also a metaphor for eclectic learning, as he browses through Pope, Johnson, Webster, etc., for lumber's meanings.
Although Baker sometimes strains when he directly addresses his concerns and predilections, it takes a rare combination of wit and effort to seem this facile without actually being so.
