Now, Voyeur

''But my feelings of shame about writing (Fermata) are entirely based on whom I'm talking to. If I'm with someone who's offended, I just want to say I'm sorry, it was a lapse, I was in a strange, overcharged mood and you know how those moods occur every October — that sort of thing. But if I'm with someone who's basically receptive to it, I can get huffy and proud and say I'm not going to justify my art to anyone!'' He sighs. ''Still, there are a number of people — some friends, some people I respect — whom I think of as reading The Fermata and not wanting to know me anymore.''

Well before Vox propelled sales and publicity, the New York City-born Baker worked for about a year on Wall Street (''I sold some stock to my uncle and my music teacher, and that was about it, so I quit and read a lot and was rejected by Harvard as a philosophy graduate student''). Married in 1985, he and wife Margaret had their first child in 1987, and the next year Baker published The Mezzanine, an intricate, comic account of one man's lunch hour. It was followed by Room Temperature (1990), an underappreciated tale of new parenthood, and U and I (1991), Baker's quirkily personal study of John Updike's fiction. Vox and Fermata have put Baker on the defensive as a dirty-book writer, but what's lost in all the tut-tutting is the fact that The Fermata contains some of his most precise and sweetly funny writing to date. No man capable of observing this can be fairly accused of misogyny: ''Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. ('Panties' is a word to be avoided, I feel.)''

Still, one cannot help but ask how much, er, research Baker did in devising The Fermata, what with its extensive citations of real and imagined pornographic publications and sexual devices. It is pointed out that Baker's reference to Juggs magazine, for instance, seems particularly authoritative. ''Oh, that's beautifully put,'' he says dryly. ''Well, I did spend a small fortune on skin magazines. I got on some recherché mailing lists because I wanted to see what the junk-mail porn universe was like. I ordered a few toys and tried to keep up with the latest developments. I'm certainly familiar with a real-world dildo.

''I hate it when I read an interview where a writer says, 'My wife and I had such fun researching this project.' Well, my wife isn't as interested in hand-held technical resources as I am — or as my narrator is, shall we say.''

Ah, there, in that hasty little conversational correction — now we get to the crux of it: If even Baker himself slides back and forth between identifying with and distancing himself from Arno Strine, what's a poor reader to do in wondering where first-person narrator Arno leaves off and Baker begins? For his previous efforts, Baker has gone on book tours, giving readings; but of Fermata he says, ''I really don't want to read from this book, about this heinous little man.''

After what seems like a fermata itself, the mechanic arrives with jumper cables, and the Baker-mobile is given a jolt of power as its owner offers a final defense of his naughty book. ''I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album 99.9 F. It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say I'm not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega.''