You can add Baker to my elite circle of treasured novelists who began publishing after I graduated from college.

Start with his ability to look in depth where others haven’t gone – the phrase “literary microscopy” fits him to a T. Sometimes what he investigates is right in front of us, perhaps an escalator in an office building or a thermometer for a daughter’s baby bottle or a common book of matches on a sequence of icy winter mornings. Other times his focus is on portent issues in world affairs like Human Smoke in the buildup to World War II, the outbreak of Covid-19, where he was the first, in “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” to argue the coronavirus was manmade and spread by accident, or the destruction of paper archives in major libraries.

I like the way he generally alternates a volume of fiction with another of nonfiction before returning to fiction, works of originality and high quality in either vein. As a craftsman, he’s impeccable, whether with 250-word sentences that flow seamlessly or fiction that’s footnoted. He writes with cool passion and an irrepressible conscience, even in the three volumes of erotica that led the New York Times magazine to dub him the Mad Scientist of Smut.

My favorite novel is The Everlasting Story of Nory, where nothing seems to happen in the first 50 pages, befitting the thoughts and expectations of a nine-year-old girl spending a year with her parents in England. Brace yourself for the tension that follows, though.