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Nicholson Baker
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U and I: A True Story Paperback – February 4, 1992

by Nicholson Baker (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 23 ratings
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Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.
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  1. Print length
    192 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage
  4. Publication date
    February 4, 1992
  5. Dimensions
    5.19 x 0.48 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0679735755
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0679735755
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

From Publishers Weekly

Baker ponders novelist John Updike in this alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing essay.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reissue edition (February 4, 1992)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679735755
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679735755
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 0.48 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 23 ratings

About the author

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Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker

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I've written eighteen books, plus an art book (The World on Sunday) that I published with my wife Margaret Brentano. The most recent one is Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art (2024). Before that came Baseless (2020), about Cold War secrets, and before that was Substitute (2016), about working as a substitute teacher in Maine schools. Some earlier books are The Anthologist (2009), a novel about a poet trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse; A Box of Matches (2004), about getting up early and making a fire; Human Smoke (2008), a bestselling attempt to look at the beginning of World War II in a new way, and U and I (1991), about the vagaries and jealousies of the writing life. My first novel, The Mezzanine, about a man riding an escalator on his lunch hour, came out in 1988 and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Vox (1992), was a phone-sex novel, and I've produced two other erotic jamborees: The Fermata, about time-stopping (1994); and House of Holes, about a surreal resort (2011). My book Double Fold, about libraries (2001), won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Occasionally I write for magazines. I was born in New York City and grew up in Rochester, New York. At Haverford College I majored in English. I live in Maine, near Bangor, with my wife; we have two grown children.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
23 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

M. R. Sheffield
5.0 out of 5 stars A Celebration
Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2016
Verified Purchase
John Updike -- the supreme stylist of the second half of the twentieth century. U AND I celebrates this.
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Billy Pilgrim
4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely not for everyone
Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2006
That may be true for most books, but it's doubly true for this one.

This book appealed to me because the author and I share a common interest (though in the case of Baker, it's more like an obsession) in the form of Updike's writing. Even so, it must be said that I agree with the negative reviews; many of them are right on. This book is often frustating and exasperating, particularly in the way Baker focuses on himself, his insecurities, his worth as a writer, and the way he does and doesn't hold up next to Updike. Not to mention the fact that several times he seemed about to, yet never does, come up with an explanation for why Updike's writing is so memorable and his words and images so long-lasting in the mind of the reader. I found myself wanting to read Updike more and Baker less...probably not the intended result (and, for the record, if Baker's own reading list is accurate, I've read way, way more Updike than him...which I found strange and unexpected, considering).

Still...Baker's writing, about Updike's writing, is often dead-on. When he focuses on that topic, he more or less succeeds; he is insightful and intelligent, and there is something entertaining in the way he struggles, strains, and sweats to dissect an author whose own writing is so often effortless.
3 people found this helpful
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Sylvia Carter
5.0 out of 5 stars another winner from Nicholson Baker
Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2012
Verified Purchase
This book caused me to laugh aloud. It's a new kind of "criticism," doing a piece a about a writer, Updike, without reading very much of his work. Nicholson Baler makes the smallest thing funny.
2 people found this helpful
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Irl Barefield
5.0 out of 5 stars this soliloquy is far better than the phone sex in Vox...
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2010
One of the most original - and honest - pieces of literature in the history of the planet, to date, at least. And by circumscribing the topice to something very specific - his obsession with what John Updike would be thinking of his thinking or doing in any and almost every regard - he may have been more successful than Verlaine in pulling of a truly honest, unmasked account of his thoughts.

Buy it.

Read it.

You'll love it.

Now: I have a sort of selfish reason for writing this review, but I stand altogether by the rather strong praise above: as one condition of writing the book, Baker eschewed any reference to Updike's writing during his undertaking. And that leaves him throughout trying to remember, without reference to a touchstone (say Updike's workds) what Updike had written about this or that. And at one point he tries to recount a poem that Updike wrote, admits that he doesn't know if he's got it right, just as I'll cop to the fact that I'm not sure I remember his recreation of Updike's poetry. I rather like my memory of Baker's verse, which makes me think that it does differ from the Updike original. Some years ago, I made the mistake of posting a request on "Yahoo Answers" for the actual line, and some banal nonanswer like "read all of Updike's poetry and you'd know" "won" the best answer.

Here's how I remember it, and a web search of the first line in quotes yields nothing.

The line is the horizon line,
the blue above, it is divine,
the blue below the line is green,
sometimes the blue is aquamarine.

Now, if a google search for the first line get's me nowhere, I'm guessing a reference to the first line's of Updike's poetry is a lost cause. And it seems that Baker has become a cause celebre'worthy of a book called something like "Understanding Nicholson Baker" (which I think he has a pretty good handle on himself) that he hasn't arranged to allow me to "Read Inside"! the book on Amazon to even pin down the Baker version.

Anyone? It's not life critical, but it is worse than a fourteen year itch. I must know if there even is a poem like this, especially given one review (Baker's by pseudomnymn? And why backpeddle from a masterpiece by calling it "semi-demented"? But maybe that Amazon review is from Updike, prior to his untimely death.

Regardles, give an old man some peace and answer this riddle, that sits sphynx-like, about two thirds back in my brain at all times, saying, WHEN WILL I KNOW?

thank you very very much!
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars I'm so glad I wasn't there
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2000
Nicholson Baker's semi-demented account of his Updike fascination begins from perhaps the slimmest premise a writer ever attempted to build a book upon. He admits that he hasn't even read most, or even half of Updike's work all the way through, and yet he can't help measuring his achievement against Updike's. Which, when you look at the imposing bulk of Updike's work against the handful of slender volumes that is Baker's, seems fair enough, at least if you think quantity is a virtue.
Yet Baker writes so well, not just about the nuances of his quasi-Oedipal relation to Updike, but about Stuff Generally, that we keep reading. When he says that a particularly sarky remark of Samuel Johnson's "merited a shout and a thigh slap", the economy of that phrases reassures us about his own talent; likewise his description of a hamburger as "substantial, tiered, sweet and meaty" makes you want to go out and chow down straight away. This is not only about Updike - although it's very good on Updike - but chiefly about Baker, and his own determination to wring poetry out of the everyday.
Perhaps Baker's real direction, if the manic momentum of "U and I" is anything to go by, is more towards the torrential worry of a Thomas Bernhard than the Olympian repose of an Updike. I only began to read Updike years after I'd read this book, and I find him a bit of a let-down. But Baker has gone on to do some entertaining things with sex, some excellent essays and a kid's book. He has demons far more volatile than Updike's; I think he should let them roam a little more freely.
30 people found this helpful
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William Mueller
5.0 out of 5 stars Even Updike had to love this, I'm guessing
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2014
One of the funniest books I've read, seriously. You have to love that Baker has the brashness to write this book even though he'd only read a few of Updike's books! I'm a fan of just about everything else he has done, but this book is really something else, unlike anything you've read. Keep a dictionary handy --- Baker has a vocabulary that's out of control.
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Glenn A. Harper
3.0 out of 5 stars Us via Amazon books
Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2011
Verified Purchase
I enjoyed Baker's MEZZANINE book more but I do appreciate his sharing in U and I typical problems author that authors face like "Have I used this idea before in print?"
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Top reviews from other countries

Kate
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2016
Verified Purchase
Excellent book
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