The second world war is a surprising topic for an author predominately known for short, plotless novels of minutiae observation. His debut novel, The Mezzanine (1988), is 133 pages of microscopic detail of an office worker's thoughts while riding the escalator to work. In subsequent novels such as Room Temperature (1990) and A Box of Matches (2003) Baker further established himself as an elegist of everyday objects - paper towels, earplugs, pillows, milk cartons and peanut-butter jars.

His passion for seemingly banal artefacts infuses his 1996 essay collection The Size of Thoughts, which includes an examination of the books used as background props in clothing catalogues, a 150-page exploration of the word 'lumber', and an essay on the fingernail clipper. The last was inspired by Stephen King's comparison of Baker's 1992 work Vox, a fictional phone-sex dialogue, to a 'meaningless fingernail paring'.

From his farmhouse in Maine, Baker, 51, says the theme of rescue is central to his work. 'I like the idea of rescuing the little ideas that you haven't quite put a frame around, and preserving in prose physical objects that seem valuable.' Human Smoke is an attempt to resurrect forgotten pacifist voices - 'to rescue from obscurity some of the people from before the second world war who were trying to help'.

Human Smoke suggests US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbour in advance and obstructed efforts to raise immigration quotas for Jewish refugees. It finds Roosevelt in his student years agitating for a Jewish quota at Harvard after noticing 'that Jews made up one-third of the freshman class'. The book shows the effect of Britain declaring war was to cut off Jewish escape routes.

Baker is baffled that Human Smoke has been widely read as implying a moral equivalence between the Germans and the Allies. 'There's no hope that Hitler is going to be a good person. I'm hard on [British prime minister Winston] Churchill and Roosevelt because you want the defenders against that kind of person to be people you really admire.'

The book has drawn criticism for relying on newspaper articles rather than secondary sources written with the accuracy of hindsight. 'By reading the newspapers and the Air Ministry reports, one gets a very different flavour for the intensity of the British effort to create havoc in Germany very, very early on.'

Baker suggests that if Britain had accepted Hitler's offer of a truce in 1939, its borders could have opened up to the Jews and allowed them to escape. 'If then Hitler did something that was intolerable, we could always have begun the killing again.' He speculates an armistice might have led to Hitler's downfall. 'Only in a peaceful situation would the support that a nation gives to a wartime leader be removed. He had a tremor. He was obviously paranoid and sick. He would not have lived very long.' Baker dedicates the book to American pacifists, writing, 'They failed, but they were right.'

But he resists identifying himself as a pacifist. 'I'm still figuring it all out. The book is not a polemic. I'm not yet at that point. A lot of what's making people angry is not the fact that I have an outlook but that some of the quotations from people like Churchill are really troubling.'

Baker is an unlikely controversialist. Softly spoken and hesitant, his speech meanders and trails off. He qualifies and retracts remarks. Interviews, he admits, give him insomnia.

None of this suggests Baker isn't a genius. Intellect is often accompanied by awkwardness. A burly man with a snowy mane of facial hair, Baker is the image of the eccentric boffin, the oddball.

In U and I (1991), Baker's memoir about his hero-worship of John Updike ('U'), the author hints at how it's possible to be both provocative and meek. 'When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect, even rude.'

As a teenager, Baker wanted to compose music rather than words. A passionate bassoonist, he aspired to rescue American music from its fashionable atonality. But he had little musical talent, while writing came so easily he didn't conceive of it as a career.

At 24, he sold two essays to The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly but, lacking further inspiration, spent his 20s working in various jobs. He was then a committed neocon. 'I liked being at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy because I got to observe people. And I loved riding the escalator to work.'

At 30, he scrimped to take six months off and write The Mezzanine, which won fame for its experimental use of footnotes. His next novel, Room Temperature, transplanted the finicky prose of The Mezzanine to a domestic setting, spanning the 20 minutes it takes the narrator to bottle-feed his baby.

Despite his fastidious books, Baker is the opposite of an obsessive-compulsive personality. 'People sometimes say, 'Boy, I would love to see your sock drawer!' They're not even joined, not even matched!' But nor does Baker see his writing as pedantic. 'If you want to write about a very large subject like why life is worth living then you need specifics - how the light shines on objects or a broken shoelace is repaired.'

With his best-selling third novel, Vox, Baker trained his meticulous eye on phone sex, alienating some of his former cult audience who saw the turn to smut as opportunistic. But Baker says it was titillating for purely literary reasons, because as a novelist 'you have to have characters speaking, and here they can be having sex and a conversation at the same time'.

Sales rose further in 1997 when it came to light that Monica Lewinsky gave Vox to Bill Clinton.

Those perturbed by Vox's sleaziness were dismayed by the pornographic follow-up, The Fermata (1994), about an office temp who can freeze time and undress his unconscious female colleagues. 'Whatever was intended, it is a repellent book,' wrote British biographer and broadcaster Victoria Glendinning. Baker insists The Fermata was not a cynical bid for sales but merely an extension of his interest in time. 'I like to go down into time - via footnotes in The Mezzanine, or the time-stop in The Fermata, or the tiny incidents in Human Smoke where you go down into a particular moment and linger there.' He returned to controversy with Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), this time earning the ire of librarians. Baker exposed how libraries, enthralled by microfilming and digital technology, were reformatting old newspapers while junking the original stock. 'If you've the next to last copy of something, you don't cut the binding off and take little 35mm pictures of it and then throw it away!' Baker alleges librarians were deceiving the public into believing the newspapers were disintegrating with age.

In 1999, when Baker learned the British Library was disposing of its post-1870 newspapers, he founded the non-profit American Newspaper Repository, purchasing more than 20 tonnes of American newspapers and storing them in a mill building near his home. He slept better after Duke University agreed to relieve him of the collection in 2004.

His spat with librarians was mild compared to the invective sparked by Checkpoint (2004). The novella presents a dialogue in a Washington hotel room between two friends debating the case for assassinating George W. Bush. Baker sighs at the idea that he was presenting a moral case for murder, pointing out that the would-be assassin, Jay, is a mentally unstable no-hoper. 'Assassination is always a disaster. The difficulty of the book was to come up with a believable character who would talk this guy out of that.'

Baker wrote the first draft of Checkpoint in April 2004 as the American forces laid siege to Fallujah. But he feels sympathy, and no hatred, for the 43rd president. 'There's a fundamental out-of-his-depthness there that neutralises the feeling that this is the man who's responsible for the deaths of innumerable innocent people.'

For all his talk about the demise of civilisation, he's forgiving of humanity. 'You couldn't have cities with all their elaborate systems of provisioning and waste disposal and incredible buildings if there weren't these large periods in which most people acted in a decent way - if we weren't fundamentally altruistic.'

Writer's notes

Name: Nicholson Baker

Age: 51

Born: Rochester, New York

Lives: South Berwick, Maine

Family: married to Margaret Brentano; two children

Next project: another novel

Novels: The Mezzanine (1988); Room Temperature (1990); Vox (1992); The Fermata (1994); The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998); The Box of Matches (2003), Checkpoint (2004)

Non-fiction: U and I: A True Story (1991); The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996); Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001)

What the papers say: 'While his novels are full of navel-gazing and self-examination, this is not the same as the critical thinking, which historians put into practice when handling sources.' - The Independent on Human Smoke

Baker on historians: 'Historians are a little like saute chefs: they cook everything up and soften the edges.' - in The New York Times