Book #107: U and I

Title: U and I
Author: Nicholson Baker

(I wrote this review for my Creative Nonfiction seminar).

Just when I start feeling like I have a pretty good grasp on contemporary literature, Nicholson Baker shows me that I’m really not all that well read, after all. I’d never heard of Nicholson Baker, have read nothing by John Updike or Vladimir Nabokov, two of his favorite authors (I have had Lolita on my Kindle for the last six months, but I don’t think that counts), and I’ve read very little of his other main influences—Joyce and Proust. However, I have had literary crushes before, so I feel like I can identify with Baker’s obsession with John Updike, despite not being intimately acquainted with Rabbit Angstrom.

When Baker was in his early thirties and had earned critical praise for the two novels he’d had published, he learned of the death of Donald Barthelme, a writer who had mentored his young colleague. Baker considers writing about Barthelme, but soon realizes that everything he thought about his mentor is now colored by the fact that Barthelme was dead. He says, “The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar” (9). Instead of writing about Barthelme, Baker decides to write about the living author who has had the greatest effect on his life and career—John Updike. When Baker began his project in 1989 (originally conceived as an article for The Atlantic, but it soon grew too big for magazine publication and was published as a book in 1991), Updike, who died in 2009 at the age of 76, was still at the top of his career as a writer, turning out novels, book reviews, short stories and poetry with an efficiency that made Baker sweat.

Baker decides that he won’t read anything Updike has written while he’s writing about Updike; he won’t even look up passages to verify their accuracy until he’s done writing (he later corrects his misremembered passages, using brackets to show Updike’s actual words—and while the differences are sometimes startling, so is the fact that at other times he remembers, nearly verbatim, long passages from Updike’s novels). He sits down at his typewriter and starts brainstorming every passage he remembers from the bits and pieces of Updike he has read, which probably amounted to about a third of Updike’s body of work up to that point. Then he writes about how Updike (who he’s met only twice, at book readings, until this point) has influenced him as both a man and a writer. While the book is ostensibly about Updike’s writings, it’s more about Baker, who isn’t shy about showing his own self-doubts, pettiness, and ambitions. For example, he talks about stalking Updike outside a reading at the offices of the Harvard Lampoon. He corners the older writer (using a phrase from Updike “life was too short not to” as justification), reminding him about the last time they met, lying about having attended Harvard. He says, “And yet if he hadn’t felt enough fondness for his old school magazine to show up that day, I wouldn’t have had my chance to wait for him near the ham tidbits, steeling myself to be pushy. I knew it was pointless, but I wanted to talk to him…” (160).  After that experience, Baker sees himself as a minor villain in one of Updike’s novels (tall, skinny, bad skin, pushy, just like Baker) but also takes away the idea that Updike may have borrowed an idea from a short story written by Baker. He concludes the book by saying, “For a minute or two, sometime in 1983, the direction of indebtedness was reversed. I have influenced him. And that’s all the imaginary friendship I need” (179).

As someone who had no prior interest in either Baker or Updike, I was skeptical about U and I. It ended up reminding me a lot of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia. It’s true that U and I was much better written (there’s no way that Powell would have snuck Madonna references all the way through a 20-page chapter—relating them to herself, to Julia Child, to food, and Baker did it in a way that delighted me as a reader). Both Powell and Baker worry about what their living subjects will feel about being scrutinized. Powell is shocked when Julia Child dismisses her project, Baker says, “Updike could react, feel affronted, demolish me, ignore me, litigate” (20). Both authors also use the exploration of another’s work to explore themselves, and both are very forthcoming about their own weaknesses.  But Baker is funnier, and less whiny, and certainly made less money on his project than Powell did. Powell, who started her project as a blogger, also doesn’t experiment with the five- or eight-page paragraph the way that Baker does. I’ve never loved a long paragraph—one of the authors I studied for my first MA thesis was Henry James, and I always knew I’d have a headache after reading him for more than an hour, but Baker does the mega-paragraph better than anyone else I’ve ever read (including Proust, but that may be my limited French speaking). I loved following the twists and turns of his ideas, and how he always managed to bring back in what appeared to be extraneous strands of thought. Yes, he could easily have split up some of those paragraphs, but I loved watching him show off.  Baker also spends a significant amount of time on the process of writing—what he should say, what he shouldn’t say, and why (although he actually does say it all).

Interestingly enough, in the two decades following U and I, Baker’s career has followed a somewhat similar trajectory to Updike’s, in the breadth of his subjects. He’s published approximately 20 books, and upwards of 50 short stories, essays and articles. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction work, Double Fold. U and I is still considered his most important work.