Sorry it's late, will this do?
William Scammell
U AND I by Nicholson Baker Granta Books, f12.99, pp. 179 first I made the usual phone call, to a man I've never met, sitting in a building I've never visited, presiding over the liter- ary half of a magazine I seldom read and whose politics I disapprove of. 'Anything to review?', I said. For some perverse reason I like reviewing. It brings in a little money, it flushes out the opposition (those with erroneous attachments), it keeps my name vaguely afloat in the public prints, it allows me to sound off or let fall a quotation (my overnight bag of wisdoms), it keeps my shelves occupied, my right hand busy, and my brain nicely pickled in ink. `There's Nicholson Baker', he said. 'How do you feel about Nicholson Baker?' `Never heard of him'. 'He's written two novels. Miniature cult figure. Decidedly literary'. When the jiffy-bag landed I took in the cool cover, author's photo (a James Fenton look-alike, scaled down a little), and a bit of the text. Think Julian Barnes, think Nabokov, think Updike — putative hero of the entire exercise — think navel, think fluff, think reflexive post- modernist, think nano-seconds and Nebraskan highways of pure idiom divorced from anything so vulgar as hap- penings.
It gave off an odour of sawdust and pastiche, as does Updike himself, probably the most overrated figure in American let- ters since Wallace Stevens, stuff to floss your teeth with when they're already brushed. The benevolent unknown commissioner only wanted a few hundred words, but could I write them? I could not. The book accompanied me up and down the motorway to Nottingham, where I am, temporarily, for the first time in my life, an official Writer (in Res, cogitans or no). It came on an Arvon course, breathing the purest north Devon air, which freshened its unwholesome lungs not one whit. It moved around my study and occasionally my mind, provoking various opening ploys and paras (at one stage I fancied an extended analogy with sub-atomic physics, hunting the snark of the smallest conceivable units of matter/meaning).
Then I picked up the Independent on Sunday and found Craig Raine closeted with this self-same artyfact, cartwheeling on pinheads, and that decided me, that sent a rush of blood to the biro. Who are these guys, I thought, in the spirit of Newman and Redford being tracked by indefatigable sign-readers (Butch Cassidy, remember?). How do they slide into Granta and Cape and the public purse? Am I the last of the Four Just Readers, the only man left on earth who can smell a rot? Of course not. It just feels that way, some- times, often.
U is Updike, you see; Nicholson Baker is Nicholson Baker, a man with two surnames and a fixation on Updike which he'd like to turn into a book. 'The arrogance of engineering your appearance of humility was itself fluorescently vile', that sort of thing. Brilliant, d'you see, self-flagellatingly top-hole, rebarbativeness reified. What's more, and just to spoil my peroration, it has a good new (to me) word, 'plasmodi- um', which the author, now I've looked it up, can be seen to have used with the utmost precision, appropriateness and aplomb. But no, I'm not going out on a U- turn or as a Mr-facing-both-ways. It festers, mightily, and no amount of Baker's vigor- ous agreement lessens the pong.
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