U and I by Nicholson Baker

I read U and I (1992) by Nicholson Baker in college alone in a cubicle, not for school, just because I didn't know what else to do or something. I remember reading it in the cubicle. It is about John Updike's role in Nicholson Baker's life. In the book Nicholson Baker says John Updike is his favorite writer and that he admires Updike's writing a lot. Then at one point he makes a list of what Updike he has read and it is something like less than 10% of Updike (like 10 pages of 5 different books, 50 pages of two books, and one or two complete books). Sometimes Nicholson Baker feels like he and John Updike are friends or something though they have never met. Nicholson Baker talks about how he has fantasized about playing golf with John Updike. In one scene Nicholson Baker gets jealous at a party when Tim O'Brien (who just won the National Book Award, at the time, for Going After Cacciato) mentions that he golfs with John Updike. Nicholson Baker thinks that he, not Tim O'Brien, should be golfing with Updike (Baker had published something like two short stories in the Atlantic at that point in his career). There is a scene where Nicholson Baker goes to McDonald's because there is a penny shortage and McDonald's is offering a free Bic Mac or something to anyone who brings in 500 pennies. Nicholson Baker is excited and feels clever and productive and gets 500 pennies and goes to McDonald's. But then feels really nervous when he gets there and feels stupid while the manager counts every penny even though there is a very long line and talks shit in his head about the manager for being stupid and counting the pennies instead of realizing there is a penny shortage and that it is more important to just get the pennies instead of making the line wait. I remember that scene well. I have a strong image of Nicholson Baker eating the Big Mac. He must have described the Big Mac well or something. I think he still felt clever while eating the Big Mac, the free Big Mac. I forget how that scene related to John Updike. Everything in the book is related to John Updike, I think. The book starts with Donald Barthelme's death and shows Nicholson Baker trying to write a tribute to Donald Barthelme to send to the New Yorker. Nicholson Baker experiences debilitating anxiety about whether or not his tribute will seem like he is just trying to sound better than other people or like he is just trying to get published in the New Yorker. He sort of wants to get his tribute published but he also wants to write a tribute that reads like it doesn't care about getting published or something. Later the New Yorker comes out and he reads the tributes that have been published and sees Updike's tribute and feels, I think, that Updike has defeated everyone else in terms of everything. I remember at one point Nicholson Baker describes how his mother fell down laughing or something after reading a golf simile by Updike that compared the size of something to a shirt, like "a ___ the size of a shirt." I remember at one point Nicholson Baker says he doesn't understand the point of non-homosexual males hanging out with each other. He also misquotes Updike extremely inaccurately many times, from memory, then later looks up the quotations and includes the correct quotations in parenthesis or as footnotes, and I think I thought it was very funny every time that happened. I think for a few Updike quotes he could not find the quote at all in Updike's oeuvre. (I may have written inaccurate things in this post in the same way Nicholson Baker did, I will not fact-check however; this is a disclaimer).