Word: vox
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...VOX by Nicholson Baker (Random House; $15). This novel masquerades as the transcript of a phone conversation between a man and a woman who have connected over an adult party line; beneath the talk runs a funny and sometimes chilling parable about relationships in the age of safe...
Baker's new book, Vox (Random House; $15), should vault him out of the anteroom of cult writers. Vox is not a voyage into the deep time of interior thought but a story that takes place in the time it takes to read it. Vox's 165 pages consist of a single telephone conversation between a man and a woman, strangers who have both called an adult party line and then decided to have a private conversation. We never find out what they do, how old they are or what they look like, but by the end of Baker...
...sexual encounter in Vox is the very opposite of another contemporary landmark of literary eroticism, the zipless sex of the '70s. Erica Jong's cheesy fiction offered a New Age pardon for the grunting libido of genital-to- genital sex. Zipless meant voiceless. Vox, by contrast, is the ultimate in '90s safe sex: voices, not hands, caress each other as Baker teases out a rambling romp of a conversation followed by simultaneous masturbatory climaxes between partners thousands of miles away...
...interlocutors of Vox -- Abby and Jim (the pedestrian names somehow don't do them justice) -- are virtuoso talkers. They are not merely poets of sexuality (an eroticized George and Gracie) but acute lyricists of everyday life. Listen to Abby's riff on pop songs that end with fade-outs ("this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we're a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night"); while Jim explains why he doesn't bother to buy such records ("you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music...
...CAPTION: VOX...