U and I: A True Story - ISBNLookup.com

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Baker ponders novelist John Updike in this alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing essay. (Feb.)

Library Journal

In this extended essay on the anxiety of influence, Baker ( The Mezzanine , LJ 11/1/88; Room Temperature , LJ 3/15/90, one of LJ' s ``Best Books of 1990'') explores his intellectual and emotional debt to John Updike. His obsession with Updike most closely resembles Frederick Exley's Edmund Wilson fixation in Pages from a Cold Island ( LJ 5/15/75), a parallel that occurs to Baker himself and troubles him briefly. Baker's essay, however, is more narrowly focused, more concerned with wordsmithing and literary craft. It is a highly subjective, even self-indulgent work that reveals little about Updike but overmuch about Baker. Nevertheless, the writing is clever and some of the ideas presented are engaging. The audience will be limited, most likely, to those with professional literary interests.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY