Updike and I: the Story of a Novel Fixation

It all started with his mother’s laughter as she read an article by John Updike.

“My mother just started laughing. She laughed so hard she couldn’t stop,” says novelist Nicholson Baker.

Baker, then 17 and very close to his mother, was envious.

He had been heading toward a career in music. A student of the bassoon, after high school he entered the Eastman School of Music in his hometown, Rochester, N.Y. But he couldn’t shake his thoughts of Updike and soon dropped music and enrolled in Haverford College in Philadelphia, where he began writing seriously at 19.

Baker found chasing Updike’s star frustrating and difficult. He got something like 80 rejections before he sold a short story. Updike’s first published story was sold to the New Yorker, and Baker badly wanted to do the same. When Baker eventually did sell a story to the New Yorker, it was his second published story, not his first.

Updike was able to support himself as a writer straight out of Harvard University. Baker was forced to go to work. From Haverford he went to Wall Street, and wrote reports about gas, oil and other energy issues. He started to write a novel about Wall Street, but concluded he didn’t know the subject well enough.

What Baker did know about were broken shoelaces, the funny way straws float in soda, rides down escalators, and the exhilarating feeling a young man fresh out of college has when he gets an hour of freedom. These became the basis for his unusual first novel, “The Mezzanine,” published in 1988. That book is set entirely during the character’s lunch hour.

His second book, “Room Temperature” (1990) takes place at 3:15 on a Wednesday afternoon as the writer feeds a bottle to his baby daughter, affectionately called “the Bug.” Baker explores things like the sound air bubbles make in a baby’s bottle and the private language that evolve with married couples.

“If you are looking for a conventional plot like boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl’s father cuts off inheritance, they get plunged into an adventure; then, no, you won’t find it in my books.” Baker says. “But I think my books do have plots. First, a person’s shoelace breaks. And then he has to get a new pair. That is far more real to most people than a typical plot.”

Now Baker, 34, has turned his obsession with Updike into his third novel, “U and I,” in which he explains how his obsession ran to style, as well as literary substance, and even health. Baker has psoriasis, the same skin condition that afflicts Updike. In “U and I,” Baker has some grim fun with it, writing, “I wanted to see whether my disease had it in itself to be worse, more consuming, than Updike’s disease. . . . “

“U and I,” is as unconventional as his other two books. Baker refused to reread any of Updike’s books before sitting down to write, and freely admits he has read fewer than five pages of “Rabbit is Rich,” one of Updike’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, and less than half of 15 other Updike books, including some of his best known works.

Explaining his theory to an audience at a reading in Berkeley, Baker said, “I wanted to describe what it really is like to read books and not remember them.”

Baker says he believes Updike has read his book because editors have told him so, but he has no confirmation from Updike. He received a copy of “Rabbit at Rest,” the book that this year won Updike his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction, inscribed “From U to You. All Best. John Updike.”

“I thought it was gallant, yet appropriately distant of him, given the nature of (‘U and I’),” Baker says. “There is a quiet implication that perhaps the next time around I ought to do a little more reading of his books--that some of his later books might be worth reading, too.”

Baker was in California for the first time on a self-styled book promotion tour. His publisher, Random House, has promised a tour for his next book, which will be about sex. This time around, Baker paid most of the bills out of his own pocket.

He left his wife, Margaret Brentano, and daughter, Alice, “the Bug,” now 4, at their home in Mt. Morris in Upstate New York.

Baker fretted that he generated too small a crowd at Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore in Los Angeles in May to justify the time and attention poured on him by Doug Dutton, the bookstore’s owner.

But Dutton calls Baker “a hero to booksellers.” “The Mezzanine” was sold almost entirely by word-of-mouth because it was published with almost no publicity, he says. “Book dealers would come through and say, ‘Hey, you have to read this one.’ His books really have to be hand-sold because they don’t fit into any category. But I’ve never recommended his books to anyone who has come back disappointed,” Dutton says.

After Los Angeles came Berkeley. And it was there, during a reading at Black Oak Books, near the University of California campus, that everything seemed to come together.

More than 100 book lovers filled the rear of the store, snatching up every available seat and standing and sitting in the aisles. People in the audience ranged from teen-agers to people in their 60s, or older, and there was a mix of men and women.

Christine Janiak, a probate examiner, said she has read women writers almost exclusively for the last 10 years. But she said that Baker wrote about women and babies in “Room Temperature” in a way she had never read before. “I nursed three babies and here is somebody who saw something I saw,” she said.

Michael Bradburn, a graduate student of Renaissance Spanish literature, said Baker’s books are marked by “prodigious observation of ordinary things--the gestures we use to invert the T-shirt that’s just been washed, the excitement of the discovery of a new machine or mechanical process, the sense we have, but never articulate, even internally, of what it is like to bang a stapler down on a sheaf of paper.”

But more than the praise and support, there was something else important to Baker at Black Oak.

Laughter. “U and I” is full of humor, and on this night, the Berkeley crowd was getting all the jokes.

Laughter washed over Baker like a tonic. No one was laughing uncontrollably as his mother had that day more than 15 years ago, but it was genuine, heartfelt laughter and good enough for Nick Baker.

He glowed.