Vox - Hardcover

Baker, Nicholson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394589955 ISBN 13: 9780394589954

Publisher: Random House, 1992

Synopsis

Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex--solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, Vox is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers. Reading tour.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholson Baker is the author of eight novels ― The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, The Anthologist, A Box of Matches, Checkpoint, and The Everlasting Story of Nory ― and four works of nonfiction, including Human Smoke. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.

From Kirkus Reviews:

On a private adult phone-sex line, Jim, a West Coaster in his late 20s, connects with East Coast Abby. Birds of a feather--both of them witty, obsessive, yuppie masturbators--they're off, trading stories and fantasies and the psychopathologies of everyday life. Baker (The Mezzanine, Room Temperature), heretofore more a monologist, a literary performance artist, than much of a novelist, folds his deadpan honesty and funny fussiness double--and though Jim and Abby finally seem so much like the same voice that they don't really qualify as characters, they don't have to: Baker has found a conceptual format, the phone sex, perfectly tailored to his talents. This is a mini-epic of Big Chill--ed safe-sex: rambling stories that start out as aids to titillation but dry and crumble into homely and self-satisfied details that challenge eroticism; the overturning of classical seduction theory (here, both the man and woman, unseen to each other, know that the other has his/her hand on his/her self); lots of little snappy apercus and joshings establish intellectual coziness. The tropes of modern sex--olive oil, VCRs, copying machines, the letters in Penthouse Forum--are traded breezily, sometimes hilariously, but are nothing compared to the main technological thrill; after Abby tells him exactly how she masturbates in the shower, Jim (in the book's best and most concentrated moment) declares it a miracle, ```a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone.''' And Baker does expose a strange kind of dignity, in that Jim and Abby aren't using each other for very much more than as instruments of exemption from embarrassment. Quite a literary season for self-relief! First Harold Brodkey as the Mahler, the Liszt, of the hand-job, now Nicholson Baker as its David Letterman. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0394589955
• ISBN 13: 9780394589954
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165