Baker: Having lived through Watergate, I don’t need to go there again.

LaFrance: Which writer do you most admire?

Baker: You know, I did Masterpiece Theatre for a long time and I read the Victorian novels, which I should have read when I was in college. I took a degree in English. I was supposed to be reading Victorian novels but never did, of course. I was in the period that read Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

LaFrance: They still assign those.

Baker: I have a granddaughter who was assigned The Great Gatsby a few years ago. I think teachers assign it because they love it. I said to my granddaughter, who was in junior high , I said, “Do you know what a bootlegger is?” She hadn’t the faintest notion. I said, “How can you read Gatsby if you don’t know what a bootlegger is?” But it’s a wonderful book, beautifully written. And I grew up in that era. I recently reread Gatsby just to see how he did it. You learn a lot about writing from Fitzgerald, at least in that book.

LaFrance: What strikes you about the mechanics of it?

Baker: I’ve read it off and on over the years. It’s a short book. It’s an easy book. It’s really not much more than a long story. But this time I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before, which is how he handles conversation among a large group of people. If you’ve ever written any fiction, trying to create a big scene with a lot of people talking, you tend to do it by everybody talking, with a lot of quotation marks, which is extremely dull and wears out quickly. And you can’t get it right.

But he creates the sense of these big parties at Gatsby’s house where hundreds of people show up, and gives you a sense of what everybody’s talking about with a very sparse use of quotation marks. He’s sort of paraphrasing. It’s beautiful to see how he does it. Because you really know what these people’s minds are like in a very short space. It’s a gift to be able to do that, to write that way.

LaFrance: And you’re still writing for The New York Review of Books.

Baker: I do an occasional piece for them, just to keep my hand in. My mind is too slow now to do much. With age, everything slows down, your mind the most disconcerting of all. I don’t write with the glibness and facility that I used to. It’s a labor for me to write now.

LaFrance: Did it never feel like a labor before?

Baker: I’m writing because I love to write, of course. It was just a pleasure to write. I’d write things for fun and throw it away. Of course, once you start making money it becomes work and it ceases to be fun, but your writing gets better.

LaFrance: That’s true, isn’t it?

Baker: I’ve always found that when writing is fun, it’s not very good.

LaFrance: I’m afraid you’re right.

Baker: If you haven’t sweated over it, it’s probably not worth it. So it’s always been work. But it’s the kind of work you enjoy having done. The doing of it is hard work. People don’t usually realize what it takes out of you. They just see you sitting there, staring at the wall, and they don’t know that you’re looking for the perfect word to describe a shade of light. I did enjoy writing. Also, I’ve probably said everything I’ve wanted to say.