Vox

...There is a certain lapse in verisimilitude in the fact that they are excited, since the odds against two people with Amos Blood's review of Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges appeared in the January 1991 TAS...

...This is what we might call politically correct voyeurism: the man never touches the woman, even in imagination, and his greatest pleasure is in hearing what is in her mind as she dithers and strums, what it is, in other words, that guarantees her sexual independence from him...

...The book purports to be a telephone conversation between two strangers, a man and a woman, whose lines cross when they both ring up a phone-sex clearinghouse advertised in pornographic magazines: for him, Juggs...

...What a man...

...The male protagonist is excited not by an accessible woman or even the image of such a woman but by the image of a woman self-contained, a woman alone, a woman masturbating: I almost think that each one of the times a woman comes in private in her life has to continue to exist as a kind of sphere, a foot-and-a-half-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension, sort of like all the ovums you've got queued up in you except these are...

...But it is hardly uproariously funny and only serves to obscure the serious contradiction between the commonness of self-abuse and the transcendent experience Baker tries to make of it, between the solitariness that is part of its nature and the normal sexual desire to share...

...Baker, author of odd works of minimalist whimsy like The Mezzanine and U and I, is clearly a coming man...

...In One Fat Englishman, Kingsley Amis described what it was that his hero, Roger Micheldene, thought men really wanted, circa 1962, from sexual congress: A man's sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these...

...for her, Penthouse Forum...

...For not only do the two characters have nothing to offer to our imaginations but their own fantasies, so we are already at two removes from reality, but the fantasies themselves for the most part eschew real sex and concentrate on masturbation, for which Baker invents kinder, gentler new slang terms ("dithering" or "strumming") to replace the rather violent and brutal ones in common currency...

...Vox has received a gratifying amount of negative publicity, including national attention for the banning by a San Francisco radio station of an ad for it which, had it run, would have been heard by only a few thousand people...

...such bizarre sexual tastes finding each other on a chat line must be astronomical...

...Or else it is something even more alarming: the last frontier, all other privacies having been long since displayed in public, for those in search of new erotic secrets...

...The American Spectator May 1992 81...

...ovums of past orgasms, weird as that sounds, and I am this one viable spermazoid lurking around among them, and I would happily spend my life floating up to one after another of these unique orgasm-spheres and looking inside and I'd be able to watch you make yourself come that one time...

...Although he says he does not mind if readers take up his book "in search of a sizzling read," he had better hope that those who do so have a very low sizzle-point...

...Those who think that Philip Larkin had the last word on the advantages of masturbation over the real thing—costs nothing, over in five minutes, the rest of the evening your own—should take a look at the state of the art in this book...

...There is a nice irony, then, in the fact that the woman on the other end of the line obliges him by indulging in fantasies that complement his...

...His words could be taken as a remarkably prescient characterization of post-modernism in the arts, which pleases by deliberately putting itself at an ironic distance from the old-fashioned, raw emotion that it pretends to represent...

...In both these stories there is a comic side...

...Not to Nicholson Baker...

...Having chosen each other from among the available callers, they are then placed in a telephonic "back room" to continue tete a tete a conversation that both expect to find arousing...

...His interlocutor answers with a story of her own involving a circus and a date with a not-very-interesting man that ends with her pouring olive oil down his trousers and the two of them then proceeding to masturbate in the shower and each other's presence...

...She imagines, to please him, not his masturbating but her own, and with truly feminine coyness engages in an elaborate tease, lasting more than a third of the book, involving an unfulfilled promise to tell him what she thought about the last time she masturbated...

...Now that thirty years of the sexual revolution's revelations have worn so threadbare the pretense that we are not animals, perhaps the sexual aim has moved on—to converting hot, wet, agitated, inarticulate, brute, and purposeless rutting into a dream-like, disembodied, unengaged voice that could only be human...

...At the climax of the novel, the two telephonists piece together a joint fantasy involving a meeting between them that finally ends in real (if the word means anything by this point) sex...

...to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal...

...I quite understand that...

...It falls rather flat, I think...

...After the book's attenuated and preposterous sexual inventions, old-fashioned coitus, even in imagination, has a grossly real feel to it that seems out of place here...

...The real centerpiece of the novel is an extended account of how he inveigled a female colleague at work into masturbating in his presence but under a blanket, while they watched a pornographic video together...

...The circus man, for example, turns out to be a "demon scrub wizard" who insists on clean(continued on page 81) VOX Nicholson Baker Random House/ 165 pages /$15 reviewed by AMOS BLOOD The American Spectator May 1992 79 ing her bathtub as foreplay...

...His new novel, Vox, is not just a masturbatory fantasy, nor yet a comic novel about masturbation, like Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, but a masturbatory fantasy about masturbation...

...But even this ideal meeting is set up by a fantastical device by which the man imagines he can detect a woman masturbating behind closed doors...

...Not only does the conversation itself take "hours and hours and hours" at a cost of $1.90 a minute, but the elaborate fantasies it describes seem to occupy most of the male protagonist's waking hours...

...This, he tells the woman on the phone, was "probably the best sexual experience I've had...

...The telephone wire picks the lock on the box wherein we keep our fantasies...

...He envisions using it to detect her in the act and finally allows himself a phantasmal stroll into her hypothetical fantasy...

...It's just that—and here's where I get confused—sexual fantasy has always seemed to me to imply a manufactured mental image of real-time sex...

...For the masturbatory idyll is the ultimate in "safe sex"—safe not only physically but politically as well and deserving the Ms...

...It is not surprising that the end they have in view is masturbation, nor that ordinary girls or guys, as might you or I, can think of a lot of sexy things to say to a stranger whom we know lives thousands of miles away and whom we never have to meet—things that might be more erotic than what we would dare say to an old-fashioned "date...

...Now, what Haystack Calhoun did for wrestling, Nicholson Baker is doing for pornography...

...magazine seal of approval...