Vox
Nicholson Baker
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0679742115
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn't know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don't work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and
fabric of your underpants." "Ooch." "Are your legs apart right now?" "They're crossed at the ankle on the coffee table. " "That will have to do," he said. "Tell me what was in your mind in the shower last night." "I honestly don't think I remember. And anyway the things I think of go by so fast. And it's not like all I do is come and come. Very often in the shower I remember some embarrassing moment, or some dumb thing I've said, and I curse it out, I say, 'Get away from me, stinker.' For
pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshhp, as my short warm self. It must have some thing to do with my estrogen level. But that's what tele phone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that's what it is like." "Ooh, I love you, you tell me everything." "I do seem to, don't I? It's very unlike m e . " "It is?" he said. " G o d , I'm a compulsive confessor. But it's rare for me to cast my bread on the waters and have it return tenfold like this." "Tell me the rest
of what happened with your friend Emily." "Why? N o , no, it'll make me seem like too much of a type." " Y o u are a type," she said. "You're right, I a m . " "Don't feel bad about it—I am too. I just want to know what you're like when you're physically holding a woman. As opposed to calling up catalogs and strangers named Klein and that sort of thing, worthwhile pursuits though they may be. What did you and Emily end up doing?" 97 "I never actually held her, that's the first thing 1*11 say. So
'That's true!" she said. "It is true? That's bad, because it means that I still have to come up with an imaginary thing, right?" "I'm afraid so." "But my imagination doesn't work that w a y , " he said. "It doesn't just hop to at the snap of a finger. What do you want the imaginary thing I tell you to be about?" "I think that it should be a b o u t . . . my beads and my silverware, since they're all laid out for us." "Well," he said. There was a pause. "Once there was 28 a guy who, um, needed