SOURCE: Kemp, Peter. “Answering Machines.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4640 (6 March 1992): 20.

In the following review, Kemp criticizes Vox, noting that its intended erotically-charged prose ultimately is more boring than arousing.

In U and I (1991), Nicholson Baker expresses an especial admiration for John Updike's Self-Consciousness. It is a predictable preference. For self-consciousness, it's increasingly apparent, is Baker's mainstay as a writer. Immersed in circumstances close to his own, the narrators of his first two novels, The Mezzanine (1989) and Room Temperature (1990), characteristically alternate between nerviness and narcissism. That Baker shares this trait is made very clear by U and I, his account of his adulatory-cum-emulatory obsession with Updike. The personality that emanates from its pages is at once self-abasing and self-advertising: Baker doesn't so much back into the limelight as slither himself into it, virtually prostrate.

In fiction and autobiography alike, the Baker persona is regularly exercised by unease. Memories of...