It’s Not the Size of Thoughts, It’s How You Use ‘Em

“I had one little thought,” says Nicholson Baker into my answering machine, continuing a conversation we began a week earlier. “I said I had no friends except a close friend here in San Francisco. Actually I have another close friend who is in L.A. and I don’t want to hurt his feelings by not mentioning him.” (Laugh.) “So, if you mention that I have friends, I don’t just have one, is all I mean to say.”

This, according to his new collection of essays, “The Size of Thoughts,” may qualify as a small thought, but it keeps him awake nonetheless. And while Baker, author of two of the most talked about, raked over literary sex novels of the decade--”Vox” (Random House, 1992) and “The Fermata” (Random House, 1994)--has dabbled in large thoughts, he is clearly happiest reconfiguring the labyrinthian details of daily life, specifically the innards of the thingamajigs we take for granted and the language we use to describe them.

In “The Size of Thoughts,” Baker takes on a variety of small objects, including model airplanes, the Maltese cross (mechanical heart and soul of the film projector), nail clippers, the demise of library card catalogs and the mysterious etymology of the phrase “lumber room,” most often used as a metaphor for the mind. The essays vary stylistically from the manifesto-like quality of the title essay to gentle rumination to the Grail-like quest through literature and history for the subatomic roots of “lumber-room.” This last essay, he thinks, was more fun than he’s had in his entire life, and that delight is contagious--sensual, if dizzying.

The 39-year-old man who limps toward me at the airport, rising at least a foot above most of the crowd, looks, in all his blissful isolation, like part knight errant, part scholar. He is wearing a houndstooth jacket, a plum sweater and Rockport-type shoes. He denies that he is limping at all, and then looks for possible explanations for the phenomenon I have identified, erroneously, as “limping.”

The man who takes me to his house in Berkeley (“Let’s try to go back the way I came,” he says with a grin) was raised in Rochester, N.Y., and, for a little while, was the “utility bassoonist” in the Rochester philharmonic, which meant that if one of the other bassoonists was sick, Baker would replace them. After college at Haverford in Pennsylvania, Baker worked on Wall Street, which seems unlikely, writing statistical reports on the oil industry.

“I remember,” he says of that time, “suddenly looking around at the street and inside my apartment and thinking, I know how to describe everything. Still, it was 10 years before I came up with a style that suited me.”

The house is in a sweet neighborhood, small wooden houses with porches, a marginally sinister character across the street watching our every move, toys out front. Baker and his wife, Margaret, who has worked in publishing and is now a full-time mother and avid reader of 19th century novels, have two children, Elias, age 2, and Alice, 8. They have lived in California for almost four years.

The computer sits in a small office, and Baker has rigged it, he explains proudly, so that he can magnify the characters 400 times, sit out on the balcony holding the keyboard and write his thousand words or more per day. “The Best Lack All Conviction,” he types, ominously magnified 400 times. I take it personally. I can’t help it, it’s so big.

“Vox” (about a long-distance sex call) and “The Fermata” have provoked varying degrees of fascination and disgust among reviewers. “Vox” (written while listening to Steely Dan) was a huge hit, but “The Fermata,” a story about a young man who uses his ability to stop time to undress women and have sex with them (written while listening to Suzanne Vega), caused a burst of self-righteousness, particularly in Britain.

Since his new collection of essays is more in the style of Henry James than Susie Bright, I wonder if he’s done with sex for a while.

“I was talking to someone the other day at a dinner party,” Baker says, “and this guy was talking to me in a gesticulative way about sex this and sex that and I thought, why is he talking to me about this? I’d completely forgotten that I’d written these two quite intimate and embarrassing books, but the nice thing about novels is that the embarrassments, the things that you reveal, are contained in the book. I really don’t like causing uncomfortablenesses at cocktail parties by making crude references, but in the great cocktail party of the mind, well, I’d like to be doing that. A third sex-obsessed book, however, would be impolite to all the other subjects in the world . . . like gardening.

“I seem,” he tries to explain, “to like to do a very thorough job with these little things, and I seem to need two books to do a thorough job. I mean, this is the work that scholars always do and that is really underappreciated.

“A different kind of scholarship seems to be in fashion now, involving, oh, I don’t know, grand theories about the body. These guys are flying at a little higher altitude. . . . I like to really skim close to the ground. . . . Now I’m nervous that readers will write to tell me I missed this or that reference to ‘lumber room’ . . . so I’ll have to publish a second edition or an addendum.”

Baker drives to the Berkeley library so that I can experience firsthand the joy he felt working on “Lumber Room.” On the way we stop at Dream Fluff Donuts. We pass Strom’s department store, which brings to mind a word Baker used for masturbation in one of the two less scholarly books: “strumming.” Suddenly, scholarship and sex seem gorgeously linked.

Once in the library we head straight for the room full of computers and turn on Melvyl, the University’s main database. One interviewer, after “The Fermata” was published, made Baker take out several porno videos and wanted him to watch them with him, and I think it can’t have been as exciting as this.

Then we pop into the reading room across the hall, which is like popping into another century, full of Persian rugs and beautiful students draped over leather armchairs, asleep over their leather-bound editions.

“I don’t think there’s any point in writing a book unless you think it could be a masterpiece,” Baker whispers.

“That’s way too macho,” I hiss.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he concedes, maybe just to keep me quiet. “But if I was told to write a history of the vulcanization of rubber, and I agree this is pathetically macho, I would want it to be the greatest book ever relating to rubber and rubber byproducts.”

“What about the noble experiments?” I ask, out in the daylight.

“I suppose I do approach literature in a slightly competitive way. . . . Literature is a perfectable enterprise, and there are better and worse ways of saying true things.

“A book is a masterpiece,” he goes on, “if it lives in your memory and you keep coming back to certain pieces of it. I still admire Updike like crazy,” says the author of “U and I: A True Story” (Random House, 1991), a meditation on a young writer’s admiration for another. “His ability to write prose has an intrinsic humanness to it; the way he is able to listen as he writes and balance things is not some finish or technique. It is a part of his goodness as a person. It is a kind of graciousness, a generosity toward the reader to have listened with such care and put the results to such good use. These days writers seem to use bursts of harsh emotion as a way of proving that they are telling the truth.”

We run into Baker’s father-in-law, who teaches medieval history at Berkeley, outside the library. He has, for years, studied the 13th century wills of the residents of the Italian town of Rieti. “He lets the documents pull him,” Baker tells me with great admiration. “He’s a good son-in-law,” says Margaret’s father.

“I don’t see it. I don’t see the Roseanne level of smartassness in real life,” says the good son-in-law as we drive to pick up Alice at the Mandarin Montessori school. “There’s a kind of mind,” Baker continues, “that is very impressive, very clever and nice to spend hours eavesdropping on, like that David Foster Wallace guy, with the thousand pages. Then there are authors, like Joyce perhaps, who strike me as being clever but they don’t have enough love in them. So while I am jealous of this mountain of verbal talent, it’s not like Updike or Nabokov, who were kind.”

Baker is coy on the subject of his next books for Random House. “When people ask what they are about I say wheelchair basketball, though now I see that someone has already written a book on wheelchair basketball. I want to write books that people actually read,” he says, “but I want to do something different.”

I ask Baker, who is now sitting with his back to the picture window in his office, why there’s so little nature in his books. “My grandfather was a pathologist who discovered a rare fungal disease. [But] everyone’s written about nature already,” he protests. “I’d rather try to say something new about toasters. Toasters are more manageable and potentially surrounded by more complicated private thoughts.

“Dappled shade is good,” he continues, just when I think I’m going to scream, “but zillions of people have described dappled shade, so I’m saving up my thoughts on dappled shade until I have something revolutionary to say about it.” I leave the topic of nature out the back door Baker has graciously opened for me.

As we are heading back to the airport with Elias in the back seat, Baker tells me about a cartoonist who wrote to tell him that the first orgasm she ever had was reading “The Fermata.” “I’m pleased,” he says, “but I’m just as pleased when someone writes to tell me their further thoughts on shoelaces. My ideal reader is decent and well-behaved. I don’t write dark. I don’t like a lot of violence and nihilistic centerlessness, so the appreciators of searing nihilistic fiction are not my ideal readers.”

“So,” I sidle up for the kill. “What constitutes a virtuous life?”

“Oh God,” he says, “This is one of those moments where you wish you were Oscar Wilde. Oh God, I don’t know . . . generosity and shumor. . . . I’m starting to sweat now, here comes a big thought, no, it’s reluctant. Can I fax it to you?” He tries to divert me by pointing to a mall he is especially fond of. “It’s an amateur mall,” he grins, “a mall that failed, a mom-and-pop mall. I am, I confess, unreasonably fond of it.”