BOOK REVIEW : Slow Meditation Finds Worlds in Moments : ROOM TEMPERATURE <i> by Nicholson Baker</i> Grove Weidenfeld $16.95, 99 pages

With a tiny pen, a slowed-down second hand and a speeded-up metabolism, Nicholson Baker has naturalized himself into Lilliput. Gulliver-like, his readers are apt to be irked, at first, at the midget dimensions and feverish activity of his books--and then, bit by bit, enticed inside. Baker takes the adages about seeing the world in a grain of sand and improving each shining minute and brings them up to date.

In “The Mezzanine,” 135 pages and relatively elephantine, the sand grain was actually an escalator in an office building; the minute, as long as it took to ride up one floor. In the 99 pages of “Room Temperature,” we have a baby’s room in a Boston suburb and the time it takes to give her a bottle.

Baker’s writing is on the order of the newest genetics. From a minute fragment of tissue, you grow an entire organism. An entire book does indeed sprout out of bottle-time in Wollaston. Whether it is a speculative novel or a speculative memoir depends on whether the father-narrator in the squeaky rocker is Baker himself, or Baker at one fictional remove. It makes no difference; either way, we are down the rabbit hole and into a garden of thinking reeds.

How far can I travel while sitting in this chair, feeding Bug? Baker seems to ask. Very far indeed, though not, in truth, into any frozen, awful or truly harmful places. Baker has some of the same warmth, both domestic and uxorious, as John Updike, as well as a like ability to hear the sea in common everyday seashells. It is an Updike crossed with Joyce, though; Baker speaks in a floating, discursive, impertinent flow of consciousness.

He starts with anything at hand: the texture of his sweater, the orange translucence of Bug’s stark clean nostril, the squeak of the rocking chair. Here, for example, he glances toward the window:

“The shade-pulls, rings wound apparently with common kite string, lunetted pieces of the distant horizon for further study: a section of a water tower, a brilliant white sweat-sock of steam that was slowly emerging from one of three smokestacks across the water somewhere in Charlestown, and a rotating bun-shaped air vent on the top of a 12-story old-folks home in North Quincy, whose dents and irregularities sent corpuscles of pewtery dazzlement in my direction.”

Such pleasurably precise launch pads--what fun to get it right, we hear this exuberant chair rocker thinking--promise some breathtakingly individual launches. Baker travels by space-borne chains of association to all kinds of places.

For example: Bug dozes before finishing her bottle; the narrator blows on her forehead to rouse her. Blowing means breath, breathing; breathing means nose. “It’s certainly not going to be a small nose,” the father-in-law had said; we get a hint of in-law irony. Then, to the Roman nose of Patty, his wife. She is self-conscious about it; he praises it as Gaudi-like; in intimate moments, he asks if he can come live inside it.

Back to Bug and the chain: Her nose is like a Cheerio. It reminds him of the nipple on air-hose valves; he thinks of the hiss while maneuvering the valve to fit the tire, and then the different sound when the connection is made. “The extra atmospheres gave it an unusual pent resonance . . . like the sounds strong dogs make as they strain at leashes.”

Baker’s associations are well out and traveling fast. He returns a moment to the rocking chair to exult--”My supreme Bug! My least thing’s life!”--and hurtles on. Bug, loving to be blown on, had been fascinated by the seat-ventilator nozzles during a plane trip. Narrator imagines the engines failing and the airliner floating down, controlled by 200 passengers manipulating 200 air vents.

Breath carries him everywhere. He remembers, as a child, sticking his face inside a pillowcase to breathe in the pillow smell. When his mother--mother of his paradoxes, as well--sets him to draw “the inside of a pillow,” he draws a pair of lungs.

From pillow to the pillow Patty used when pregnant and took for reassurance to the hospital, and from there to what she felt under anesthetic as Bug emerged: “She hallucinated that she was passing a pile of neatly folded laundry through her cervix.”

Over and over, there are glimpses of a marriage, still playful and tender--meaning fragile, as well--and sexy. There is the foreshadowing of something more settled and older. Patty writes a journal; she will not show it to him; he attempts to devise a system of reading by the sounds her felt-tip pen makes.

He is all there, all-sentient, all-cherishing. He is too much, sometimes. Sometimes you wonder if there is any air left for anyone else after one of his deep, intoxicated inhalations.

But time passing redeems it all. If the narrator constructs worlds from moments, it is because they won’t last. This lovely, sometimes demanding meditation--in its brevity, it can seem slow, and some readers will lack time and patience to read a book so short--tells us that carpe diem (“seize the day”) may already be out of date. As he meanders through the raised glass indentations on Bug’s emptying bottle, Baker is seizing the nanosecond.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Faulty Ground” by Gabrielle Donnelly.