U and I: A True Story by Nicholson Baker

U and I: A True Story by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary, nonf_biography, nonf_criticism
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2011-06-01T22:00:00+00:00


7

Mean? Yes, he is mean. He seems at times to admire meanness — I’m thinking, for instance, of that puzzling sentence of his that always appears on Anne Tyler paperbacks: “Anne Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good.” He favors the sudden devastating zingers that people spit at each other in moments of anger. (In the scene that made me stop reading Marry Me, the husband and wife really do spit, using real saliva, at each other. [Actually the husband says “You dumb cunt” and the wife then spits in his face.]) The mother in Of the Farm hisses extraordinarily sharp things to Joey, the divorced narrator, things like, “You can support one woman, but not two,” and “You’ve stolen my grandchildren from me.” (This second line, which like the first may not exist, especially impressed my mother. In fact, I don’t remember reading it myself; I only remember my mother once citing it to me years ago as an instance of Updike’s perceptiveness about divorce.) In Marry Me, again, he has the protagonist swat one of his sons on the head in the middle of dinner [really in the middle of saying grace], in a creakingly psychological bit of “taking the divorce out on the children.” I hate this. In the carefully modulated dynamic range of a psychological novel, a swat on the head or spit in the face severs (and Murdoch’s A Severed Head may well be behind Marry Me and Couples) the bond with the reader as unpleasantly as something out of a slasher movie. Maybe it really happened — so much the worse for my opinion of Updike. The meanness that first bothered me, though, when I encountered it a decade ago, long before I was married, was in a short story in Pigeon Feathers in which a young husband returns with hamburgers and eats them happily with his family in front of the fire, and thinks lovingly of his wife’s Joyceanly “smackwarm” thighs, and then, in the next paragraph, says as narrator (the “you” directed at the narrator’s wife), “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly.… The skin between your breasts is a sad yellow.” And a little later, “Seven years have worn this woman.” This hit me as inexcusably brutal when I read it. I couldn’t imagine Updike’s real, nonfictional wife reading that paragraph and not being made very unhappy. You never know, though; the internal mechanics of marriages are shielded from us, and maybe in the months after that story came out the two of them enjoyed a wry private joke whenever they went to a party and she wore a dress with a high neckline and they noticed some interlocutor’s gaze drop to her breasts and they saw together the little knowing look cross his unpleasantly salacious features as he thought to himself, Ho ho: high neckline to cover up all that canary-yellow, eh? Updike knows that people are going to assume that the fictional wife of an



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.