Understanding Nicholson Baker

In addition to being celebrated as a prose miniaturist for such works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Nicholson Baker is widely viewed as a best-selling highbrow eroticist for Vox and The Fermata. In Understanding Nicholson Baker, Arthur Saltzman engages these provocative fictions as well as Baker's renowned nonfiction to show how his seemingly disparate works derive from and demonstrate an unremitting zeal for explicit detail, along with descriptive obsessiveness and linguistic virtuosity.Through close readings of Baker's work -- including his 1998 novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory -- Saltzman provides not only an introduction to a spirited writer but also a systematic appreciation of the rewards of his writing. Saltzman describes Baker's work as inventive, unpredictable, and minutiae-oriented and concludes that Baker is consumed with fundamentals -- from arriving at a drugstore, to getting a baby to sleep, to rooting out the history of a plastic bottle or a bit of slang -- and that Baker's aim is to revise the very nature of literary adventure.