Nicholson Baker may well be the most unpredictable writer working today. To take a random sampling of his output, which is the only kind of sampling his output permits, he has dissected his obsession with John Updike (U & I: A True Story); written a phone-sex novelization (Vox) that was given as a gift by the twentieth century’s most infamous intern to her boss; and condemned Churchill’s prosecution of the war against Germany (Human Smoke). His shifting interests resemble the trivial pursuit called a “Wikirace,” wherein participants try to get from, say, “ukelele” to “stem cell research” in the fewest possible Wikipedia links.

It is thus not at all surprising that Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, is about a mid-list poet called Paul Chowder who is too inef ...