Where other contemporary American novelists, mandarin or popular, like to write about war in South-east Asia, corruption in the boardroom, organised crime and the alienated condition of the human soul, Nicholson Baker prefers to tackle the truly important issues of our time: how to lift a pair of underpants with your toes, how to make a bar of soap revolve in your hand by strategic squeezing, why it is perfectly permissible, indeed thoughtful, for gentlemen to relieve their bladders in the seated position traditionally favoured by ladies, the demonstrable superiority of the English spelling 'grey' to the standard American 'gray'.

For readers who discovered the uniquely beguiling qualities of Baker's project in the late Eighties, when he published his mock-heroic tale of an office worker's lunch hour, The Mezzanine, his latest novel represents a welcome return to terrain at once comfortingly familiar and bracingly fresh.

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