From Amazon.com
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
--Ce texte provient de la
Paperback
édition.
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.
