U and I by Nicholson Baker

U and I by Nicholson Baker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Nicholson Baker explores his creative process through his obsession with John Updike as he recalls a lifetime of reading John Updike and what he remembers without opening a book for reference. Wonderfully witty and charming and sending me back to read his idol and his idol's idols: e.g. Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Henry James ("The Figure in the Carpet"), Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes and Pages from a Cold Island, Edmund Wilson, BARTHELME DONALD, Nabokov Vladimir and his 3x5 cards for his fiction (Pnin, Glory).
Opening sentence: "On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law's study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap."

A favorite quote:
"Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals." 135

"With dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren't gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can't quite master. Heterosexual male novelists don't for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing and indeed of art, aspre, and this big time grandeur attracts them, but they find much to their perplexity, that they can't internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges."

"They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses by James Joyce, War and Peace, Pnin."



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