Books like U and I

Pleasingly bizarre idea for a book, as Baker uses Barthelme's death as an excuse to spiral into an essay on his obsession with John Updike (a writer, as Baker points out, that I would NEVER have connected with Baker), who was still alive. The gimmick, and one I quite like, is that Baker deals with the influence of his memories of Updike's lines, and only after the fact does he go back through and find out what the actual phrases are. Often, he is wrong. Often, his are better. The leaky nature of influence is fascinating - there's a sequence in Rilke's "The Notebooks of M.L.B." that I've always been terrified to look up because it's been so influential on my writing - and Baker is, as ever, hilarious. There's a long sequence about coins that's excellent, and the meeting with the man himself toward the end of the essay/book is wonderful. Take this characteristic paragraph. Updike has just ascended a ladder to change storm windows while on camera for a PBS broadcast when "in the midst of this tricky physical act, he tosses down to us some startlingly lucid little felicity, something about 'these small yearly duties which blah blah blah,' and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs ON A LADDER!"There is lots of stuff that good. But two issues: (1) I myself am of two minds on Updike (quite liking the Maples stories; enjoying Rabbit 3 but not so much 1,2, or 4) and so care more about Baker than Updike, which led to occasional boredom (2) the book has an odd obsession with Baker's overcoming homophobia that feels really dated and had me on one occasion flinging the book aside. It is very minor to the plot, but it's irritating.