"The Way the World Works," by Nicholson Baker In an interview that appeared in The Paris Review last year, Nicholson ­Baker was asked about the importance of realism in his work. "It becomes interesting," he observed, "to come up with words that wrap around reality's utility pole." There's something nice about that sentence. When you squint, it's actually doing what it describes. And it's deeply Bakerian (Bakeresque?) in more than one respect: in its sheer oddity, for starters (befitting a 6-foot-4 former bassoonist who cycles around in a big Quaker beard); in its blending of high ideas with a certain insouciance of tone ("interesting to come up with words that . . . "); and finally in the downright pornyness of its entendre - not even "the utility pole of reality," but "reality's utility pole" - which, coming from the author of some of our culture's most explicit literary sex, can't help calling to mind a scene in his 1992 novel "Vox," in which a character reads, "very slowly," the memorable phrase "up . . . and . . . down . . . on . . . his . . . pole." There isn't much sex in "The Way the World Works," Baker's charmingly miscellaneous new volume of essays. That's not a profound act of critical noticing, perhaps, but the absence jumps out if you know his work. Fiction, with its lowered inhibitions, seems to free that part of his mind. Apart from a single stray memory of self-abuse in someone's empty, arty house, this new collection contains only one piece with an explicitly sexual theme - "Sex and the City, Circa 1840" - and it's superb. A book review (from this newspaper), it considers the so-called flash press in mid-19th-century New York, erotic newspapers for "sporting" gentlemen, which kept a "watchful eye on all brothels and their frail inmates, . . . interviewing half-naked women in the park, excoriating sodomites" (escort reviews, they're called today). Baker lets us peek "through a tiny, smudged window" onto this world of nymphs and fancy men and their lecherous clients. But what's so moving about the essay is that, as Baker titillates us with details, he's quietly turning his review into a tribute to archival restoration itself, and beneath that, to old newspapers as objects. Baker is notably passionate on that subject - his nonfiction book "Double Fold," published a decade ago, was largely about the destruction of such papers by libraries bent on digitization at any cost, and at various times he has even been a kind of activist in that world, fighting alongside like-minded librarians against discard-happy administrators. He seems to have recognized in this review a chance to point at something concrete by way of argument - here, in newspapers like The Flash and The Whip, is precisely the kind of thing that disappears when you don't take pains to preserve it. Not just information but past lives. Little ghosts of men and women walking through the columns of type. He writes of going to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass., and (in a passage that channels Hawthorne's great triptych-essay, "Old News") approaching the "acid-free folders, stored on cool shelves with brass rollers - full of strange lost scandal." This ability of Baker's - to snatch little impressions in the chopsticks of his prose - is on good display in these essays. Several times he returned to me some sensation from childhood, a feeling I'd forgotten I remembered, like how, back when phones had rotary dials, one sometimes "hurried it back around and felt the center gear strain slightly," or how Bazooka Joe bubble gum "had a comic on an inner sheet that we read with great interest but never laughed at," or how, on a sewing machine, "the down-darting lever in the side . . . rose and fell so fast that it became two ghost levers." Among the best essays here is one Baker wrote for The Washington Post Magazine, a gently experimental thing, somewhere between a diary and a list, titled "One Summer." Every paragraph begins, "One summer. . . . " The topics range from childhood to the recent past. One summer I got a crush on a girl who was 11. I was 11 at the time as well. One summer my daughter learned how to read the word misunderstanding. "One summer I read an old copy of "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" with great fascination." Baker is a natural essayist, in the sense that the form hews to his habit of mind. He's a guy who'll happily, or at least helplessly, sit and think for 20 pages about, say, the Kindle (in "Kindle 2") and what it means. He procures one of the things. He reads De Quincey's "Confessions" on it. He calls its name "cute and sinister at the same time" - a nice little nested bon mot that forces you to think about burning libraries to figure out what he means. But Baker defied my expectation of a reassuringly crypto-Luddite ending by at last, after many attempts, enjoying a novel on the machine (Michael Connelly's "Lincoln Lawyer"). The matter of the text - the story itself and the sound of it in his head - emerged through the medium, as they always will, through infinite technological changes. "Poof, the Kindle disappeared," Baker writes, "just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would." There are times when Baker's relentlessly even and likable tone, his for the most part refreshing unwillingness to try too hard, lend a slightly phoned-in feeling. If I were collecting 15 years of my best nonfiction, I might be tempted to leave out the pieces that begin, "Wikipedia is just an incredible thing," or "I'm fond of Google, I have to say," or one (on the death of Steve Jobs) that ends, "You have to love him." At the very least he could have, you know, upped the level on those lines, pre-pub. But Baker's little moments of slackness (very rare, and noticeable only for that, really) seem to go hand in hand with his greatest strength, namely the confidence of his own mind, the quality that makes him, for me, a fiction writer whose work will always be of the highest interest. He has what Rousseau and, yes, De Quincey had, and what Joan Didion has, the bravery of self-exploration - the reason he's one of the only people around writing in an open, artistically serious way about sex. Granted, this has partly to do with the psychologically dubious idea we have in America that sex doesn't represent fully mature terrain for the artist, unless it's delivered with sufficient Updike-Rothian darkness, whereas Baker's handling tends toward playfulness, as in his recent fantasy of utopian sexuality, "House of Holes." John Jeremiah Sullivan is the author of the essay collection "Pulphead."