Contemporary Literary Criticism | Baker, Nicholson - Richard Eder (review date 12 May 1991)

Richard Eder (review date 12 May 1991)

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Psoriasis and All.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (12 May 1991): 3, 9.

[In the following review, Eder discusses U and I, commenting that the work seems to be a plea directed at John Updike for acknowledgment.]

In The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker extracted a whole personal cosmology out of a lunch hour, much of it spent on the escalator returning to his office. In Room Temperature, he harvested another crop of autobiography and musings from an hour spent giving his baby a bottle and putting her to sleep.

Miniaturist of time and experience, one of our most original and gifted new writers, Baker is the supreme literary string-saver. His books, all short and, in the case of this new one [U and I], bound roughly the size of Winnie the Pooh, are friends to trees; ecological microcosms.

The grain of sand he sees the world in is...

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