U AND I: A True Story [Import] [Paperback]

Nicholson Baker (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Granta; New Ed edition (1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140140409
• ISBN-13: 978-0140140408
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,467,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've written thirteen books, plus an art book that I published with my wife, Margaret Brentano. The most recent one is a comic sex novel called House of Holes, which came out in August 2011. Before that, in 2009, there was The Anthologist, about a poet trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse, and before that was Human Smoke, a book of nonfiction about the beginning of World War II. My first novel, The Mezzanine, about a man riding an escalator at the end of his lunch hour, came out in 1988. I'm a pacifist. Occasionally I write for magazines. I grew up in Rochester, New York and went to Haverford College, where I majored in English. I live in Maine with my family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anxiety of Influence, September 22, 2001

By 

John Abbott (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: U and I: A True Story (Paperback)

Baker has a gift for writing very funny pieces about subjects that are usually dry and serious. Nominally about John Updike, U and I is mostly concerned with how young writers are influenced by the "tradition" of past writers. He's anxious, for instance, about "The Anxiety of Influence." Has Harold Bloom covered the same ground already? Baker doesn't know, because he hasn't read Bloom, and now refuses to do so, for fear that the book will "take me over, remove the urgency I feel about what I'm recording here." His vague ideas of Bloom's argument have come second hand. "Book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought." That doesn't stop him wildly speculating about what Bloom would say, and then sheepishly confessing to some of the books that have directly influenced his own work in progress, such as Exly's A Fan's Notes and Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.

John Updike, in an interview that appeared in Salon, praised the book himself. "It has done me a favor, that book, because it's a book like few others. It's an act of homage, isn't it? He's a good writer, and he brings to that book all of his curious precision, that strange Bakeresque precision."

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The influence of anxiety., October 31, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: U and I: A True Story (Paperback)

Imagine a late-night chat session around a few beers, in which a good friend who happens to be a writer starts to tell you about his obsession with John Updike; but the story is a little too weird to take seriously (your friend starts off telling you that he has only read a small percentage of Updike's work) and a little too funny to be true (your friend's mother gleefully introduces him to Updike at a book signing); so you, entertained, listen to the whole story in a state of somewhat suspended disbelief. The story turns out to be brutally honest, of course, because the friend turns out to be Nicholson Baker, before his name became synonymous with anxious, detailed fiction. The inflated relationship to Updike, sustained hilariously in his mind like a zeppelin, turns out to be based on a couple of fan-meets-idol encounters, since the story is about Baker as a young, unestablished writer; but this doesn't mean that Baker and Updike aren't (or weren't) linked together by some fundamental literary bond. This book is Baker's attempt to examine the roots of that bond, and the results are delectable, side-splitting, and painfully embarrassing. Drink a few beers while reading.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I'm so glad I wasn't there, October 27, 2000

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: U and I: A True Story (Paperback)

Nicholson Baker's semi-demented account of his Updike fascination begins from perhaps the slimmest premise a writer ever attempted to build a book upon. He admits that he hasn't even read most, or even half of Updike's work all the way through, and yet he can't help measuring his achievement against Updike's. Which, when you look at the imposing bulk of Updike's work against the handful of slender volumes that is Baker's, seems fair enough, at least if you think quantity is a virtue.

Yet Baker writes so well, not just about the nuances of his quasi-Oedipal relation to Updike, but about Stuff Generally, that we keep reading. When he says that a particularly sarky remark of Samuel Johnson's "merited a shout and a thigh slap", the economy of that phrases reassures us about his own talent; likewise his description of a hamburger as "substantial, tiered, sweet and meaty" makes you want to go out and chow down straight away. This is not only about Updike - although it's very good on Updike - but chiefly about Baker, and his own determination to wring poetry out of the everyday.

Perhaps Baker's real direction, if the manic momentum of "U and I" is anything to go by, is more towards the torrential worry of a Thomas Bernhard than the Olympian repose of an Updike. I only began to read Updike years after I'd read this book, and I find him a bit of a let-down. But Baker has gone on to do some entertaining things with sex, some excellent essays and a kid's book. He has demons far more volatile than Updike's; I think he should let them roam a little more freely.