2 - The Full Range of Updike's Prose

Summary

In his inventive and utterly fascinating novel U and I Nicholson Baker builds variations on his obsession with John Updike, his bemused envy of Updike's stature as a writer, his fascination with Updike's steady curve of success, his imagined resemblances and differences with the person of Updike, his unease with the pervasive influence of Updike in his own life and work – even though he never really discovers the kinship, the commonality of themes and temperament, that would account for such an influence. Eccentric and Shandean though Baker's narrative certainly is, it reminds a reader, nonetheless, of various interactions with a writer's work that are not eccentric at all, that are central and universal. One of these is the continuity of impression a writer's work has on the memory of a sympathetic reader. Obsessed with Updike, Baker's narrator implicitly asks, After, long after, the experience of having read Updike, what remains in the memory to account for the continuing conviction of the magnitude of his art? And Baker's answer, again and again, is not character or event, not even vision or sensibility. It is style.

“Vast dying sea”: the phrase struck Baker at an early moment, he tells us, an irreducible fragment of Updike that survived his reading of him.

In an early story a character leans his forehead against a bookcase, and considers ‘all the poetry he had once read evaporating in him, a vast dying sea.’ […]