There was a Victorian naturalist named Frank Buckland who liked to eat what he studied: jaguar steaks, armadillo stew. Nicholson Baker displays something of the same urge, only refined and let loose on the zoo of consumable things. They don't have to be consumer goods, let's be clear. The sensibility that gave the chief character of The Mezzanine “Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of” as his sixth most frequent thought ever, didn't have its drab utility in mind. His pleasure was more avid; it bypassed mere vacuuming.

The point is the discovery of incidental adventures for the gastronome. And so [in The Size of Thoughts] in these exercises in applied epicureanism, it transfers with ease to such challenges to digestion as industrial-process technology. Baker bibs hot metal, sips at the “vintage 1979 Cincinnati Milacron injection press”, a “hulking, squirting” monster, “ministered to by taciturn women who, but for their safety glasses, might have been milkmaids in another life”. A long impassioned defence of card-indices for the New Yorker intends serious advocacy, but refuses to conceal the purity of Baker's response to the cards—grimed on their top edge in exact proportion to the book's popularity. Other people use card catalogues to find books. Among them, we imagine Baker, a man in secret rapture, riffling the drawers just to revel in the sheer catalogue-i-ness of the act.

He encourages experiment. CD-ROMS played on an audio CD deck produce mostly saw-edged buzzing “around a low E-natural”, but with interludes of “lyrical swooshing, as of several cooling hoses playing over the mind at once …” Stung into emulation, I read to a sceptical friend the paragraph of the title piece where Baker expresses a wish for thoughts big enough “to rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings”. “Ah, come on,” she scoffed promptly. “That's like saying I use balsamic vinegar in all my thinking.”

It's true that the latent power to annoy in Baker's style seems to blossom when he isn't writing fiction. Even though his male leads—synaesthetic supernerds, all of 'em—aren't exactly unrelated to NB himself, some negative capability seems to operate in the novels; some interplay between his intelligence and the concocted status of fictive events. Little bubbles of untruth cling to the underside of his obsessions and buoy them up. In the novels he sees to it that mock-pedantic footnotes and other accessories are aerated—and rationed, too. Here, in “Lumber”, Baker pursues the word “lumber” through the history of EngLit for 150 unrelieved pages, and all pleasures for the reader are definitely incidental ones.

On the other hand, no one since Nabokov has displayed anything like Baker's fastidious density of invention. He finds words—show-off clever, Yankee-ingenuous ones, arranged in sentences of exquisite marquetry—for sensations so deeply lost in daily living that their recovery has a miraculous quality. Often they're tacky, which pleases Baker, who praises a dictionary of American slang for serving up “each livid slang word on a decorative philological doily”.

He can savour, and therefore make visible, the intangible sensuality of a train of thought. What he is less good at is the unwitting drift of minds. Again like Nabokov, he is no friend to the unconscious, perhaps because the whole direction of his imagination is toward the perfect articulation of the mind's littlest movements. To accept the profanity of these is not at all to be comfortable with the idea of involuntary drives.

After Vox and The Fermata, some large, unanswered questions about Baker await: why—apart from his aptness to its technical needs for endless synonyms, an endlessly re-invented carnality to prevent the fantasist's desensitisation—he should be so drawn to porn; and why the bodies of women have their place in his world of stuff. The minute detailing of his prose tells against awareness of these big shadows, though the winking accuracy of each idea contributes a pixel to some Leviathan-sized concerns.

You won't see Baker's whales directly. But there are moments, as in the resolute perkiness of his mood whenever sex comes up, when a certain pressure makes you aware of their presence. The white paper ocean rumples from beneath.