- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reissue edition (Feb 4 1992)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679735755
- ISBN-13: 978-0679735755
- Product Dimensions: 17.3 x 1.4 x 20.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #395,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Anxiety of Influence,
By
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."
4.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Amusing B.S.; Fine Comedy,
By
This review is from: U and I: A True Story (Paperback)
This eccentrically gripping book will remind you of every all-night college bull session you ever participated in. Baker's increasingly discursive rants about Updike reveal more about the present author than the Great Man, of course. Keep this book in mind the next time you read a really annoying review of an author you admire. It's just some poor slob trying to justify his existence. And that's the real point of this memoir, of course; we all make our own solipsistic uses of other people. If we are lucky, we grow out of it and get some objectivity. In the meantime laugh along with Baker AND DON'T TAKE LITERARY POLITICS SO SERIOUSLY!
5.0 out of 5 stars
The influence of anxiety.,
By A Customer
This review is from: U and I: A True Story (Paperback)
Imagine a late-night chat session around a few beers, inwhich 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.
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