I may be missing something, but I was struck by the bootlicking interviews that Nicholson Baker gave about the genius of John Updike since he died. I always thought Baker despised Updike, and that his book U and I was an archly ironic and deapan deconstruction of Updike. But I read it over 10 years ago so maybe I misremembered or was wrong in the first place. Or maybe I just hate Baker these days. His books have gotten progressively worse and unforgivably stupid. He is tracking along with Philip Roth in terms of rather a sordid decline to irrelevance, but Roth has far further to fall and Baker is moving quicker. He'll hit bottom sooner, unless he is already there.