U and I

"Gosse is making a point, so he emphasises the archetypal opposition between fathers and sons. Nicholson Baker also does this in U and I , although he’s talking about authors and authors. Baker had written two novels before he wrote this. Recently he’s hit the front pages for writing about sex so much, and for referring to the male member as “the Malcolm Gladwell” [the bestselling author and journalist]. But his first two novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature , are interested in stuff nobody had ever imagined writing a novel about before – what characters think about while feeding their baby, what happens during their lunch hour. And then he wrote U and I , which is uncategorisable really. You could say it’s an essay, but it’s also a sort of autobiography and a piece of literary criticism . It’s a tribute to John Updike, who is the U. It’s about Baker’s admiration for and envy of Updike, but it’s also about literary admiration and envy in general, and about insecurity and longing in the widest sense. It’s highly discursive and incredibly funny. He fantasises about meeting John Updike at a party, or playing a round of golf with him and making a prat out of himself. The style is conversational and at the same time highly wrought, which is a pretty neat high-wire act. No, it’s an essay. And essays allow you to digress. So if he wants to write a paragraph about Alan Hollinghurst [the novelist] then he can do that. If he wants to write a paragraph about how little one remembers even of the books one really loves, he can do that too. It lets him indulge his small, passing curiosities and still pursue this broader arc – which describes not just his feelings about John Updike, but about being a young man starting out and wanting to make something of his life. A young man looking up to an older man who’s already done that, which is inspiring but also annoying and a source of insecurity. Yes, there’s a sleight of hand at work that you could say is disingenuous. He spends a lot of time saying that he never gets down to doing any work or finishing anything. He keeps beginning essays and then leaving them, beginning projects and then putting them aside. But in the process of saying all that, he produces this book which is brilliant and original and will be around for a long time."