BOOK REVIEW: ‘B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal’

OPINION:

B & ME: A TRUE STORY OF LITERARY AROUSAL

By J. C. Hallman

Simon and Schuster, $26, 277 pages

Becalmed on his sea of love for literature, writer J. C. Hallman decides total immersion in the work of a writer whose reputation he admires might rekindle his passion for reading good books. One of the main reasons for his unhappy state, the author tells readers in this frank and candid autobiography that reads like a novel, is that his appreciation of literature has been deadened by working as “a ’tenure-track’ instructor of undergraduate literature and writing.”

Mr. Hallman picks Nicholson Baker, the author of nine books, a writer whose work is better known than he is, thanks in part to Monica Lewinsky, who gave President Clinton a copy of “Vox,” Mr. Baker’s racy novel about two people avidly engaged in phone sex. Mr. Hallman writes,”I began to feel a certain literary attraction to Nicholson Baker that, viewed from the perspective of my crisis, loomed with the promise of an antidote. A salvation. In other words, Nicholson Baker had become a writer I needed to read. He had entered my personal canon.” [So,] “what needed to be done was to tell the story of a literary relationship from its moment of conception, from that moment when you realize there are writers out there in the world you need to read, so you read them.”

To start, Mr. Hallman orders “U and I,” Nicolson Baker’s account of his own fascination with an older writer, in his case, John Updike. The book arrives and Mr. Hallman “unsheathe[s] it with Christmas morning verve,” only to find he has another problem: He likes it so much he can’t keep reading it because he likes it so much. And there we have the main conflict this autobiography would need to have were it fiction. Wait, there’s another novelistic conflict. The author has recently invited his girlfriend, one Catherine, a photographer, to move in with him, and they are at the beginning of what he describes as a very happy cohabitation.

Those two themes, with the author’s quest to recapture his love of good books through his love of Nicholson Baker’s books being dominant, occupy the rest of the book.

On he slogs, trying to get back to Mr. Baker’s body of work, his “oeuvre” as they say in graduate school (and France), with little success until late in the book. Along the way, Mr. Hallman comments, always trenchantly and often with humorous insight, on literature and writers and readers, as well as, chiefly, why we should still love to read, Internet or no Internet.

Even though the author and Catherine (clearly one of the most long-suffering figures in current nonfiction) are having less and less of it, sex is a favorite topic, but Mr. Hallman’s is the least prurient writing about the elemental topic that I have had the misfortune to read in decades. Dare I say boring? There comes a point when readers tire of over-frequent references to previously taboo sex practices, much like audiences in comedy clubs that stop laughing when the F-bomb is dropped too often.

However, there’s much to like about this book. Mr. Hallman is clearly a smart guy and an engaging writer, and his comments on a wide variety of subjects give both pause and pleasure.

He’s also a mean man with a metaphor. For example, sounding more than a little like George Carlin, he writes that certain metaphors are contradictory: “A work that ’makes you think’ forbids you the comfortable state of not thinking, just as a book you ’can’t put down’ denies free will. ’Heavy-handed prose’ annoys us even as we long for that which is ’heavy’ in significance.” And, my favorite, writing about “Vox,” he notes that a pause in the dialogue “sticks out like a comma in Gertrude Stein.”

Let’s cut to the chase. This is a great book to read if you love reading books and are worried about their future; and it’s a great book to read if you love words and love to see them gainfully employed, often with humor. There’s even enough of a narrative for lovers of the novel form. But as the author finally fesses up, “Nicholson Baker is not, and never has been, the true subject of this book what needs to be said is that the literary world has set itself on fire, and as a result it has become more and more difficult for any reader to find their Nicholson Baker, to find the writer who will become Nicholson Baker for them.”

Mr. Hallman notes the debt Mr. Baker owes the James brothers, both Henry and William, and at times his prose mirrors that of the former, which is nice work if you can get it. There is a graduate school of English tint — not taint — to this book that almost makes it read like a popularized rewrite of a Ph.D. dissertation on Nicholson Baker’s entire body of work with a special emphasis on the influence of Henry James. But that shouldn’t bother a serious-minded reader for long, given how many other pleasures this intriguing book provides.

• John Greenya is a Washington writer and critic.