Nicholson Baker | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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The Everlasting Story of Nory, [35] 80; The Mezzanine, [69] 87; U and I: A True Story [79] 7

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U and I and Me

George Cochrane on Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story

I hadn’t read much John Updike when I picked up Nicholson Baker’s book on him during lockdown; but then neither had Baker when he wrote the book. This is one of the novelties of U and I. Where most non-fiction strives for mastery of its subject, this little book pursues that ‘very spottiness of coverage [that] is, along with the wildly untenable generalizations that spring from it, one of the most important features of the thinking we do about living writers’. The result is a funny, profound meditation on what writers actually mean to readers as opposed to what academics tell us they should mean.

Making a Meal of It

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Plot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after the right one snapped: a thought-provoking coincidence. Clutching his Penguin copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and pausing first for a pee in the men’s room, he descends the escalator to buy a bag of popcorn, a hot-dog, a cookie, a carton of milk and a new pair of shoelaces. Then he goes back up the escalator to his office, carrying his small bags. That’s it.

How Alice Grew Up

Jeremy Noel-Todd on Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting Story of Nory

Nicholson Baker’s fifth novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory, was not, as its 9-year-old heroine might say, the world’s most raging success. I picked it up as a pocket hardback in a clearance sale. A week later, I returned and bought the remaining stock at a pound apiece, to distribute to friends and family.

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