Nicholson Baker is most famous for Vox, the phone-sex novel Monica Lewinsky gave President Clinton, but the vastly superior U and I contains Baker's own dirty little secret: an obsession with John Updike. Not since Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus has one man's genius so publicly tormented another. Baker's ambition is a naked thing shivering with sensitivity, like a snail bereft of its shell. Yet his book about himself thinking about Updike is as hilariously self-knowing as it is excruciatingly sincere. And Baker is not mad (not quite). He does have a few things in common with his idol: fiction precociously published in The New Yorker, psoriasis, insomnia, a keen eye for everyday minutiae, and a mischievously felicitous prose style. He is, however, funnier. Hunting for Updike at The Atlantic's 125th anniversary party, he gets brutally snubbed by Miss Manners--U and I is a fine comedy of literary manners--and cheers up when Tim O'Brien chats with him. But when O'Brien mentions that he golfs with Updike, Baker is hurt:

It didn't matter that I hadn't written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn't written a book of any kind, and didn't know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O'Brien.

He justifies this reaction with a remarkably intricate series of associations between his life and Updike's, starting with the major impact a golf joke in an Updike essay once had on him. When Baker reads in the paper that his local cops offer to X-ray kids' candy for razors, he plausibly imagines the droll "Talk of the Town" piece Updike might have spun from the item, glumly noting that Updike's piece would have been better. He even teasingly confesses that U and I constitutes "a little trick-or-treating of my own on Updike's big white front porch." By the time he actually meets his hero (at Rochester's Xerox Auditorium!) in 1981, Baker has transformed him into a character in a Baker story. Quite a trick--and a treat.

In his elegy for Yeats, Auden wrote that a great poet's words are modified in the guts of the living, but Baker proves what really happens: at best we misremember and mangle, shamelessly remaking the master in our own image. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly
Baker ponders novelist John Updike in this alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing essay. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this extended essay on the anxiety of influence, Baker ( The Mezzanine , LJ 11/1/88; Room Temperature , LJ 3/15/90, one of LJ' s "Best Books of 1990") explores his intellectual and emotional debt to John Updike. His obsession with Updike most closely resembles Frederick Exley's Edmund Wilson fixation in Pages from a Cold Island ( LJ 5/15/75), a parallel that occurs to Baker himself and troubles him briefly. Baker's essay, however, is more narrowly focused, more concerned with wordsmithing and literary craft. It is a highly subjective, even self-indulgent work that reveals little about Updike but overmuch about Baker. Nevertheless, the writing is clever and some of the ideas presented are engaging. The audience will be limited, most likely, to those with professional literary interests.- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNYCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

From the Inside Flap
Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

About the Author
Nicholson Baker has published five novels–The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, and The Everlasting Story of Nory–and two works of nonfiction, U and I and The Size of Thoughts. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Baker ponders novelist John Updike in this alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing essay. (Feb.)

Library Journal