U and I: A True Story [Hardcover]

Nicholson Baker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 1991

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


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

This expansive already used 'wide-ranging'.aa essay recounts how the novelist John Updike (the "U" of the title) has wielded an uncanny influence on fellow novelist Baker ( The Mezzanine ). Baker calls the genre here "memory criticism," a form that "relies entirely on what has survived in a reader's mind from a particular writer over at least ten gs years of spotty perusal." Alternately self-deprecating ("What's he Baker done that is so good that he thinks he can freely criticize Updike?") and self-aggrandizing ( "Do you think I'm a better writer than Updike?" since you say he's talking to his wife, I'm not sure if double quotes are needed. aa Baker asks his future wife), the book presents a telling portrait of a working writer and critic. This is not a primitive, adulatory dialogue with the oeuvreok? of a lofty father figure; rather, it is a quivering "imaginary friendship" with living literary kin. Like all good essays, these are full of fertile tangential thoughts, as in Baker's delineation of one of the "risks" that he believes is implicit in memory criticism: "It depends to an unusual extent on whether you the reader like me." Such thoughts stay in the mind long after annoyingly arch self-commentary--"my entire buttock region, as day-glo-sic colored as a baboon's"--has been and gone. First serial to the Atlantic; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 179 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (April 3, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394589947
• ISBN-13: 978-0394589947
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,668,089 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.