[In the following review, Loose commends the comedy and complex ruminations in U and I, noting its examination of the rivalry between Baker and author John Updike.]

U and I, an idiosyncratic essay on John Updike (the “U” of the title), is a creepy piece of madness, and its author, Nicholson Baker, an enragingly irreverent smart-ass. If this sounds a little severe, I should explain that these comments come from U and I itself. To anticipate criticism is often to disarm it, as Baker knows well (“Who will sort out the self-servingness of self-effacement?”). Yet this is a peculiarly risky book, and some readers may agree with Baker's assessment of himself as an “enthusiastic, slightly crazed, fringe, no-bullshit idiot-savant”.

For well over a decade, Baker has been obsessed with Updike. U and I starts as a kind of elaborate IOU, a tribute to the older author's protean genius. Baker jokingly terms his impressionistic approach a “closed book examination”, for he draws exclusively on his existing knowledge of Updike's work (rather less than half of an extensive output). In Baker's short, hugely enjoyable novels, characters' thoughts spiral out from some small-scale object (a shoelace, a baby's bottle) to form self-portraits of unexpected complexity. In U and I, his ruminations begin with his feelings about Updike, and the result is an autobiography as anguished as it is amusing. Quite simply, Baker discovers in himself that decidedly non-U emotion—envy.

One awful, bitter realisation fuels U and I: “He writes better than I do and he is smarter than I am.” This difficult truth provokes jealous awe (“Clever bastard!”, “He's a fucking maestro!”), pointed stylistic criticism, and some very funny confrontations, both real and imaginary.

Baker fantasises about engaging his maître in literary conversation during a round of golf (although he can't actually play). Updike appears to him in a dream as a drunk train conductor, and, back in excruciating reality, Baker button-holes the great man at a Harvard party (Updike politely advises him to keep writing).

Driven throughout by “some grinding gear of self-betrayal”, Baker plays manic court jester to Updike's unassailable majesty. Inevitably, Baker's anxieties over literary belatedness are less entertaining than the everyday worries of his fictional protagonists, who fret about nose-picking, using the office loo, and marital intimacy. There is also something exhausting about his insistence on showing us more of himself than we want to see—for example, his welcoming of psoriasis as one more testimony to his likeness to Updike.

But U and I appears less of an oddity in the context of American confessionalism, especially when set against Updike's own autobiography, Self-Consciousness. Here, Updike also discloses an early “frantic ambition and insecurity”, a sense of “the self-serving corruptions of fiction”, and, strikingly, describes his own memoirs as “shabby” and “scab-picking”. Baker, elsewhere so alert to self-deception, apparently overlooks how U and I strives to outdo its precursor in relentless truth-dealing. In the end, though, it is hard not to warm to such candour. The tragicomedy of literary rivalry has never been expressed so nakedly, or so well.