Me & U & I

It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-glo-colored as a baboon’s…

Though Nicholson Baker is not exactly obscure—his novel Vox may have been the world’s most famous book for a couple of days during the Lewinsky scandal—his book U and I: A True Story qualifies: out of print in hardcover (and teetering in paperback), sent forth virtually stillborn by its publisher (Random House), not widely reviewed, now hard to find, and with a sales trajectory not merely dropped, but thrown down a well, U and I must have seemed a ghastly mistake, at least to those trying to make money off it. Yet I say you should read it. I believe it to be Baker’s best work.

Baker, early in his career, was seized with the idea that he should write about Updike while he was still alive, while “people could still conceivably sneer at him” and, under the influence of this seizure, pitched the idea to an Atlantic editor and when it was accepted felt very much like a dog who has unexpectedly caught a car: now what?

Twitching and squirming (and precisely recording each twitch and squirm) Baker made the brilliant (if lazily self-serving) decision to prepare by not rereading any of Updike’s books—not even to verify quotes! He half-seriously dubbed this technique “deprived recall analysis”, reasoning that what he really wants to write about is Updike’s influence on him as a writer, and he is unpleasantly honest enough to admit that said influence boils down to a stew of misremembered phrases, covetous admiration, and jealousy. However, acknowledging the need to quote accurately in this litigious age, Baker does review the quotes he’s cited, after he has finished the essay. The resulting comments, presented throughout in brackets, are an amusing and occasionally profound gloss on the text, a crackpot Talmudic commentary. “What is wrong with me?” he wails, after correcting one particularly appalling misquote.

What results from this is a personal essay on steroids, sort of an unauthorized autobiography. Not incidentally, it may also be the best intercranial view of the writing process yet published… but see also John Jerome’s The Writing Trade: A Year in the Life, if you like this sort of thing.

There are two things I love about Baker’s writing: his “Bakeresque precision” (Updike’s phrase!) and his ability to obsessively capture the streams-of-thought/motivation/memory that pass through him. No one has ever done this better, and Baker has never done it better than he has in U and I. It is fascinating, funny, and almost scary to read, for example, “I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. 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,” and I find myself writhing a bit reading Baker’s moral dilemmas when he writes—for three pages—about the flip flops of intent he experiences when trying to write a simple letter of condolence after the death of Donald Barthelme; he wants to be sincere, but he also wants to be quotable. Who else has so minutely described the base motivations that gust through all of us, even when we are trying to do the right thing?

A caveat: U and I is not comfortable reading, and if you have the feeling after a dozen or so pages that it’s not for you, you’re probably right. Baker is self absorbed—”On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn’t enough.”—and his subject matter can be repulsive, as when he discusses his psoriatic symptoms (“It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-glo-colored as a baboon’s… I had bloody skin under my fingernails from compulsive scratching that I cleaned out as I read…) and his envy of Updike’s more advanced case (“I put off the trip to the dermatologist that I knew was imminent, though, because I wanted to see whether my disease had it in itself to be worse, more consuming, than Updike’s disease… ” [italics mine]); psoriasis, in fact, is a major theme of this odd book. But even if you find yourself repulsed, consider sticking it out. At 179 lean pages, U and I will convince you of two things: that you are not the only one who obsesses unhealthily about minutiae, and that you are very likely better off in this regard than Nicholson Baker.

Tagged as: book reviews, people, writing