Contemporary Literary Criticism | Baker, Nicholson - Peter Kemp (review date 6 March 1992)

Peter Kemp (review date 6 March 1992)

SOURCE: Kemp, Peter. “Answering Machines.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4640 (6 March 1992): 20.

[In the following review, Kemp criticizes Vox, noting that its intended erotically-charged prose ultimately is more boring than arousing.]

In U and I (1991), Nicholson Baker expresses an especial admiration for John Updike's Self-Consciousness. It is a predictable preference. For self-consciousness, it's increasingly apparent, is Baker's mainstay as a writer. Immersed in circumstances close to his own, the narrators of his first two novels, The Mezzanine (1989) and Room Temperature (1990), characteristically alternate between nerviness and narcissism. That Baker shares this trait is made very clear by U and I, his account of his adulatory-cum-emulatory obsession with Updike. The personality that emanates from its pages is at once self-abasing and...

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