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Synopsis
Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.
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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
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.
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- PublisherGranta Books
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 184708351X
- ISBN 13 9781847083517
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number2
- Number of pages192
- Rating
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U and I
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U & I: A True Story
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U & I : A True Story
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U & I: A True Story
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U & I: A True Story
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U & I : A True Story
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U AND I (Paperback)
Seller: Grand Eagle Retail, Wilmington, DE, U.S.A.
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. When Nicholson Baker, one of the most linguistically talented writers in America, set out to write a book about John Updike, the result was no ordinary biography. Instead Baker's account of his relationship with his hero is a hilarious story of ambition, obsession, talent and neurosis, alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandising. More memoir than literary criticism, Baker is excruciatingly honest, and U and I reveals at least as much about Baker himself as it does about his idol. Written twenty years before Updike's death in 2009, U and I is a very smart and extremely funny exploration of the debts we owe our heroes. Baker's startlingly honest, very funny account of his obsession with John Updike. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781847083517
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U I
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