Nicholson Baker’s unquenchable curiosity shines through in collection of essays

—“The Way the World Works,” Nicholson Baker; Simon & Schuster (319 pages, $25)

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Nicholson Baker’s new book, “The Way the World Works,” is a miscellany: a collection of 34 essays originally published in magazines such as the New Yorker, McSweeney’s and the American Scholar between 1996 and 2011. And yet, as Baker makes clear in the final essay, “Mowing,” there is method to his madness, a shape that becomes fully apparent only with the book’s closing lines. “I want to write a short book called ‘The Way the World Works,’” he declares there. “I want it to be a book for children and adults, that explains everything about history, beauty, wickedness, invention, the meaning of life. ... I know it isn’t really simple, and I know I’ll never write the book. ... (But) once in a while, as on a perfect morning such as this, you’ll have the rapturous illusion that everything you know adds up.”

Here we see Baker’s aesthetic in a nutshell: whimsical, self-reflective, always looking at the line between imagination and reality; it’s an aesthetic of connection, of possibility. It helps that “Mowing” echoes, in its focus on domesticity and (yes) even lawn care, the first essay in the collection, which gives the book a kind of frame. But more important is a sense of indirection: This is a random collection, Baker is telling us, that turns out not to be so random, in much the same way as the world it seeks to explain.

Baker, to be sure, has long practiced the art of indirection. His first novel, “The Mezzanine,” tells of a man buying shoelaces on his lunch break — although really, it’s about much more than that. “U and I” meditates on his fascination with John Updike by relying less on research than on memory: What, Baker asks, did Updike mean to him? Perhaps my favorite of his books, 2010’s “The Anthologist,” offers an extended monologue by a poet with writer’s block that becomes the very piece its narrator is unable to write.

What these works share is a sense that how we think, our idiosyncratic dance with both experience and memory, defines who we are. This is a key to “The Way the World Works” as well. “Curiosity is a way of ordering and indeed paring down the wildness of the world,” Baker tells us, and throughout the collection, he takes us through a number of his obsessions and fascinations — family, newspapers, the fate of libraries — many of which have emerged in his writing before.

In that sense, and not unlike his first book of essays, “The Size of Thoughts” (1996), “The Way the World Works” is an act of literary cartography: Baker mapping his own mind. The essays range from a page or two in length (“Writing Wearing Earplugs,” the delightful “How I Met My Wife”) to extended meditations on video games, Wikipedia and the Kindle. Baker draws on a host of antecedents, giving “The Way the World Works” the feel of a commonplace book — a book, in other words, of impressions, grouped in loose categories.