You don't give no lip to Big John .sx James Wood .sx U and I :sx A True Story , by Nicholson Baker ( Granta Books , pounds12 .sx 99 ) .sx FREUD thought writers fortunate because , unlike most people , they can make use of their fantasies and daydreams by turning them into art .sx Nicholson Baker has produced two novels which do not so much convert as enact daydream - its cartoonish logic , deep inconsequentiality and mad focus .sx Out of the apparently small and superficial , something enduring emerged .sx His latest book reaches glorious new depths of shallowness .sx U And I is about literary love , about a young writer's ( Baker's ) love - rivalrous , one-sided , hopeless , word-drunk - for an old established pro ( John Updike) .sx This love is revealed in all its permutations of pettiness :sx Baker envies Updike , adores him , wants to usurp him , wants to play golf with him , indulges his excesses , corrects his unkindnesses , strives to remain free of his influence .sx Hardly a day has gone by in the last 15 years , says Baker , when Updike has not occupied a thought or two .sx Baker lays bare the young writer's embarrassing anxiety , spite and childishness .sx And this is an embarrassing book :sx reading it is like watching an adolescent telephoning his first date .sx It is utterly original .sx In the long heated history of writers struggling with loved predecessors - Johnson on Milton , Proust and his parodies , Lawrence on American fiction , James Baldwin on Richard Wright - there has never been a book quite like this .sx Harold Bloom , whom Baker mentions but says he has not read , has written about literature as an Oedipal battle of displacement :sx the son must slay the father .sx Bloom spends much time tracing the influence of predecessors on younger rivals .sx Look for what these successors exclude or bury deep , says Bloom .sx Look for what they repress .sx Baker , reacting against Bloom , does not hide his repressions or bury them deep .sx He hauls them up , shining and shameless .sx His book is thoroughly of its time .sx It strips away the grandeur of literary rivalry and reveals its contemporary pettiness .sx He admits to childish envy and vanity .sx He dreams about Updike , admits to conducting imaginary interviews with the Paris Review , considers applying for a Guggenheim because it is the only grant that Updike has ever made use of .sx At a party , the writer Tim O'Brien tells him that he goes golfing with Updike .sx Consumed with envy , Baker stamps his foot :sx " I was of course very hurt that of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area , Updike had chosen Tim O'Brien and not me as his golfing partner .sx " After a digression on the uselessness of male friendship , Baker admits to his only desire :sx " And yet I want to be Updike's friend now !sx " .sx He has met John Updike twice .sx The two encounters are gripping , hilarious and a little revolting .sx At the first , a book signing session , he takes a book to Updike to sign .sx Slyly , Baker tells Updike that he has recently been at the New Yorker office and has seen that Updike has a story coming up .sx Updike , politely and patiently , understanding the greasy etiquette , asks Baker what he was doing at the New Yorker office .sx The younger writer announces that he too has a story coming up .sx Updike asks for the date of publication , and then says " good" .sx Baker and his mother walk away with " flushed , what-new-fields-can-we-conquer-now ?sx faces " .sx At his second meeting , at a Harvard party , Baker blocks Updike's exit from the party , engages him in obsequious nothings , and then sees Updike backing away from him , " knowing the obligatory praise-heaping and grovelling scene was coming " .sx Baker asks his girlfriend if she thinks he is a better writer than John Updike .sx She tells him that Updike is a better writer , but that Baker is smarter .sx He is crushed .sx His mother tells him , consolingly , that he will be a better writer than Updike .sx Baker faces the terrible truth , in mock-italics :sx " He writes better than I do and he is smarter than I am .sx .. this observation will surprise no one ; it came , however , as quite a shock to me .sx " .sx Above all , this delightful book is about the exquisite , luxurious , sick-making challenge and seduction of style .sx It is a book about words , and about the envy by one who uses them well of one who uses them consummately .sx It is impossible to imagine Baker having this obsession about , say , Raymond Carver of Joyce Carol Oates .sx In this sense , there is no better choice than John Updike .sx Of all American writers he is the greatest and most infuriating stylist .sx He stuffs his sentences with satiny cushions and padded delights .sx His sentences have an easy plumpness which maddens the young writer :sx one wants to be as good as him , but not that good .sx His elastic brilliance , his serene liquidity drives Baker almost to despair .sx " I wanted so much to have the assured touch , the adjectival resourcefulness .sx " Repeatedly , Baker confesses astonishment at Updike's almost seasonal prolificity ( " A man so naturally verbal that he could write his memoirs on a ladder " ) .sx Indulgently , Baker corrects Updike , especially for using adjectives like shivering , as in " shivering petrol " , words " slightly too cutely anthropomorphising for their contexts .sx " He ticks Updike off for criticising Nabokov for lacking suspense :sx " Updike is no master of cliffhanging himself remember .sx " There is a comic disparity in all this :sx Baker envies Updike for his serene , comprehensive , wise professionalism .sx But Baker is himself frantic , flickering , partial .sx In the end , amor vincit :sx " I find that whenever I try to point out a flaw in his writing , I fail .sx " Baker is moving on how , when he was writing his first novel , Updike's slim perfect book , Of The Farm , was his constant guide .sx Every day , he read a few pages before beginning his own writing .sx " It became the measure of all worth .sx .. more than once I had tears in my eyes .sx .. " , parts of it were " so fine that my competitiveness went away " .sx This is the catharsis of true love .sx For any writer or strong reader this book will delight .sx For this particular reader , who might as well admit to a similar obsession with Saul Bellow , this book spoke like a friend .sx Baker is unique , but he is not alone .sx A man called Louis Gallo wrote a book in the sixties a little like U And I called Like You're Nobody .sx It was about a young writer's ( Gallo's ) joy at receiving a fan letter from the great Saul Bellow , and how he ruined the friendship by over-reacting , and sending mad and indiscreet letters back .sx When he sent 30 pages of his journal , Bellow decided he'd had enough and closed the correspondence .sx The end of the friendship made Gallo wistful :sx " You end where you begin , " he writes , " like you're nobody .sx " The difference is that Baker is no nobody .sx He is a fine writer .sx Twenty years ago Susan Sontag asked for a new criticism , " an erotics of criticism " - loving , staying close to the loved object , sensitive to feeling .sx Baker , in his hilarious , embarrassing , insane and moving way , has produced just that .sx From Mad Max to the mad prince .sx To see or not to see ?sx Mel Gibson's Hamlet is not the Shakespearean tragedy some critics feared , says Derek Malcolm in his review of the new films .sx A FILM is a film and a play is a play .sx What is more , they have , for the most part , entirely different audiences .sx This Franco Zeffirelli understands better than most , as he did with Romeo and Juliet .sx With Hamlet ( Odeon , Haymarket , U ) he has produced a version of Shakespeare that is very likely not to satisfy purists ( who may see no reason why Hamlet and his mum should be incestuously inclined ) , but is attractive enough to look at and simple enough to follow for a wider audience than would usually be persuaded to pay good money to watch the Bard .sx In the eyes of this wider audience , of course , the bull point about the film will be the presence as Hamlet of Mel Gibson , who would pass as a poor man's Laurence Olivier only in the worst of thunderstorms but has a following of almost lethal dimensions compared with any classical actor one could name .sx He makes a plain-spoken , rather uncomplicated Hamlet who sometimes seems scarcely to know what's hitting him but bravely tries to mould fate to his own ends all the same .sx Which is not necessarily a bad interpretation if only because it makes one look past the character at the play itself .sx What we then find is a very attractive castle , bathed in unfamiliarly good weather in which almost everybody is slowly going mad , possibly because of over-familiarity with a score which for Ennio Morricone is rather lacklustre .sx " You can't act madness , you can only suggest a lack of normalcy " , the estimable Anthony Hopkins said the other day of his formidable Dr Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs .sx And it is to the credit of Helena Bonham-Carter's sad little Ophelia that she produces a mad scene that seems to have digested that lesson very well .sx Ian Holm's Polonius is not so much dotty as nicely eccentric , as if he's a man used to making even himself giggle but reasonably trustworthy all the same , and Alan Bates' stolid King surveys the scene with every hope that , amid the general dottiness , his own guilty soul is unlikely to be noticed .sx Certainly not beside his anxious wife ( Glenn Close ) whom I must confess reminded me more of Lady Macbeth than any other Gertrude I have come across .sx All these are sound performances , with Close's perhaps the most consistently watchable , though some of the auxiliaries only just pass muster .sx They are , though , as pretty as the sets and many of his admirers may possibly think Gibson's Hamlet even prettier .sx Certainly David Watkin's photography bathes everything in the best possible light and Zeffirelli's conception , which is akin to the kind of psychological thriller filmgoers will instantly recognise , is funnier than usual and without its darker , more complicated undertones .sx A Hamlet , in short , that is not the tragedy some thought it might be and is , in consequence , making more money on the American market than most would have suspected .sx Ken Loach's Riff-Raff ( National Film Theatre , with a run from Friday ) was one of David Puttnam's developments when head of Columbia and , when he left , eventually became a Channel Four project .sx It will be shown at the Director's Fortnight at Cannes , where there isn't much doubt that it will be treated as film rather than jumped-up television .sx And so this beguilingly artful piece of work by one of our best directors should be , small budget or no .sx It is his most successful for some time , a parable that's politically and socially relevant but also immensely entertaining , like Mike Leigh's High Hopes .sx It's sad that television will claim it so soon after Cannes .sx Set on a London building site where a group of itinerant workers assemble under the orders of a hectoring ganger , it has all Loach's unforced and unpatronising sympathy for the underdog and , like most good comedies , a serious point to make .sx In fact , if anyone is patronised it is possibly the audience , since just occasionally its polemic sticks out like a sore thumb as if we can't know what it is talking about - the greed and exploitation of the past era - unless we are told in so many words .sx That , however , is my only criticism of Riff-Raff , which otherwise orchestrates a fine set of players with an unerring feel for the real truths of ordinary life at the lower end .sx The writer , Bill Jesse , who died before he could see the final cut , tells his story through Stevie , a young Glaswegian just out of Barlinnie prison , and Susan , the girl he falls for , a would-be singer who will probably never quite get it together .sx In these parts , Robert Carlyle and Emer McCourt are excellent but there are so many fine little cameos that it seems invidious to single out anybody .sx This is ensemble playing at its best , and the result is as impossible to dislike as it is for a one-legged cat to bury a turd on a frozen pond .sx