[In the following review, Malin offers a positive assessment of The Size of Thoughts, commenting on the deeper themes within the collection and Baker's other works such as Vox and The Fermata.]

I remember my first reading of The Mezzanine, I was puzzled by the obsessive attention to detail (especially in the footnotes). Baker used much space for references to Marcus Aurelius and mall design. Why did he consciously cultivate the details? Was he linking consciousness to detail? Was he, in effect, writing a philosophical novel that masquerades as a satire?

In his first collection of essays [The Size of Thoughts,] Baker gives us a wonderful, perverse essay on the linguistic turns of lumber. He endeavors to locate not only its first usage in the OED; he searches concordances to Pope, Browne, and others, so that he can discover whether or not lumber ever suggested thought. And as he travels through the literary past, he finds, among other things, that the mad Kinbote may have been found in Nabokov's reading of Housman's Selected Prose: “Mr. Mary should write a novel. Nay, he may almost be said to have written one; for his notes on book iii (Lucilius' journal to Sicily) are not so much a commentary on the surviving fragments as an original narrative of travel and adventure” (my emphasis).

Baker's essay—written in his slow, tentative, Jamesian way—confirms that his fiction is, in effect, an attempt to capture “the size of thoughts,” the way we perceive “reality.” And in “Changes of Mind” he muses about musing. Thus this odd collection is “lumber-room” for reviewing the notorious Fermata and Vox, novels deemed salacious, pornographic, slight. They are “hoaxes”; although they pretend to be interested in sexual details, they are, in fact, absorbing inquiries into the nature of language and perception.