SOURCE: Buchan, James. “It Makes You Go Blind.” Spectator 268, no. 8540 (14 March 1992): 31-2.

In the following review, Buchan comments on Vox and U and I, acknowledging that Baker is a talented writer, but panning the works for their descriptions of common, everyday events in minute detail.

Anybody who has travelled on public transportation in the United States will know that many Americans delight in telling their intimate histories: it is part of their notion of Liberty.

Nicholson Baker is an artist of this confession compulsion. His people plump themselves down, pale and atwitch from long study and self-abuse, and quite soon you've heard about their career ambitions, medical problems, reading programmes, upstate New York childhoods, deodorants; how they put on their socks in the morning; their failure to win or even be entered for the National Book Award; their sexual fantasies and anxieties about bad breath; why they didn't...