Nicholson Baker is a novelist and essayist whose reputation rests on two distinct talents. First, he is an exquisite miniaturist, unmatched among his contemporaries in terms of his lavishly detailed attention to the minute particulars of everyday objects and activities. His signature strategy is to slow down and super-magnify. As Thomas Mallon put it in his profile of Baker for Gentleman's Quarterly (May 1996), he "doesn't just count the angels on the head of a pin; he does long division with the feathers in their wing tips." From shoelaces to paper towels to the pleasures of writing on a rubber spatula with a ballpoint pen, nothing is too small to escape Baker's scrupulous eye and elegant prose. He coaxes layered etymologies and rich histories out of mundane materials, showing by example the surprising and abundant rewards of refusing to take anything for granted. Relentlessly meditative, an eloquent spokesman on...