“This obligation to write out one’s own mind, to express the mind’s multifariousness and complexity, is something that Wallace and Baker are very interested in. Baker’s subsequent work attests to a slow rumination on everything his eye crosses, while Wallace seems not just committed to cataloging everything that goes through a mind but the act of mental mastication that occurs at the same time. If one could call Baker and find him home thinking, one could find Wallace home thinking about thinking. His stories are above all about thinking, the pain and recursion of it, the entrapment of it.”
— Barrett Hathcock, on Nicholson Baker as the link between Updike and Wallace.
