<![CDATA[U and I: A True Story]]>

false <![CDATA[U and I: A True Story]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171249056m/92541.jpg 92541 6 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: <blockquote> 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. </blockquote> 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 387507 1991 U and I: A True Story total:253|5:69|4:95|3:66|2:16|1:7| 253 962 340 26 4 3 false false Mon Aug 04 15:12:53 -0700 2008 Sun Sep 30 14:18:30 -0700 2007 Mon Aug 04 15:12:53 -0700 2008
"I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage-points of passage."

2) I just ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Dec 10 11:49:13 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 10 11:54:14 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Apr 14 10:29:11 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 14 11:00:10 -0700 2009 Good book to read if you have two hours to kill waiting for the fucking night owl bus and its mid-April and 40F and raining. For anyone who has had a distant hero-worship/kill the father literary complex and finds they are constantly comparing the most minute biographical data of the objec...more...]]> 1 1 false false Sat Dec 29 02:25:13 -0800 2007 Sat Dec 29 02:27:26 -0800 2007 5 0 false false Sun Nov 08 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 10 19:29:16 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 10 19:37:31 -0800 2009 Rabbit Is Rich comments but I will reiterate how much I enjoyed it, as I have everything I have read by Baker. His obsessions are various and entertainingly discussed - one is whether he will ever be considered a "genius" on the level of John U...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Sep 16 10:45:40 -0700 2008 Tue Sep 16 10:54:06 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1992 Sun Dec 21 08:53:50 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 21 08:58:04 -0800 2008
I did. Of course, I also made a drive once in my undergrad days to Cornish, NH to try to connect with JD Salinger, so I k...more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004 Fri Oct 30 11:40:06 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 30 11:42:59 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Sun Aug 23 13:48:43 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 23 13:49:31 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Mon Apr 27 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 27 20:35:09 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 27 20:36:19 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Mar 17 20:25:35 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 17 20:25:35 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Tue Feb 10 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 09 20:12:09 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 10 19:07:07 -0800 2009 2 0 false false Sat Jul 19 22:24:19 -0700 2008 Sun Jul 20 14:22:28 -0700 2008 The Size of Thoughts will please me more. Given that I'm not a fan of Updike perhaps I was predisposed to dislike the book, but there was definitely a moment herein where Bake...more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Sep 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Sep 21 09:50:49 -0700 2008 Wed Sep 24 19:35:40 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2000 Wed Nov 14 11:21:21 -0800 2007 Wed Nov 14 11:33:31 -0800 2007 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed May 27 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 06 09:25:10 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 01 11:38:35 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Jun 12 05:53:18 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 12 05:54:41 -0700 2007 4 0 false false Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2005 Tue Dec 18 22:38:46 -0800 2007 Tue Dec 18 22:38:46 -0800 2007 5 0 false false Fri Mar 28 20:57:54 -0700 2008 Fri Mar 28 20:58:46 -0700 2008 5 0 false false Sun Nov 25 13:09:41 -0800 2007 Sun Nov 25 13:19:35 -0800 2007 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=92541