TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020392/0203470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 59

1-900-AURAL SEX


Nicholson Baker explores the nature of arousal in his dazzling
and erotic (but not pornographic) novel Vox

By RICHARD STENGEL


    Artists who work on a small scale have traditionally been
known as miniaturists. The term has a kind of pat-on-the-head
condescension about it, a sense that the miniaturist is forever
relegated to the artistic minor leagues.

    But just as quantum physicists have revealed that the
world inside the atom -- with its whizzing elementary particles
and clouds of electrons -- is just as grand as the big,
blooming universe outside, artists who construct a magnum opus
out of the microscopic have become major-leaguers.

    Nicholson Baker is a subatomic physicist of fiction, a
quantum suburban Proust. He is a wizard at anatomizing the
micromechanics of mental life, at charting the quicksilver
zigzags of decision and indecision, a writer who can spin out
a mock epic from a pair of broken shoelaces.

    His first novel, The Mezzanine, takes place in the time
its protagonist ascends an escalator, but it is a dazzlingly
dense journey into the mind of a man who meditates on subjects
like the delights of perforated paper. His second novel, Room
Temperature, occurs during the 20-minute reverie of a young
husband feeding his six-month-old daughter, but it explores, in
droll, Andy Kaufmanish detail, the history of a marriage. U and
I, Baker's third book, is an extended brooding on a single
self-mortifying question: Is John Updike a better writer than
I am?

    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's brief novel, the reader knows these two characters
inside, if not out.

    The 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.

    The two 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").

    A just-the-facts-Ma'am summary of their conversation would
go like this: she fantasizes about having sex with three house
painters, while he tells her how he and an office co-worker sat
in his apartment, covered by a blanket, and silently,
separately masturbated to a porn film.

    But to condense Vox that way is to describe Lolita as the
story of a randy professor and a dim-witted 13-year-old girl.
It misses the myriad ah-yes analogies, the deadeye humor, the
fervent, carnal lyricism of what is not pornography (as some
will call it) but an anatomically correct, technology-assisted
love story.

    Jim is a kind of platonic voyeur. He doesn't seek to peer
into women's bedrooms but into their brains. He masturbates to
the idea of women masturbating. He postulates a sexual
Heisenberg's principle: "A man is a watcher, and a watcher
disturbs the purity of the event." Abby is aroused mainly by her
ability to arouse. She is a Hall of Fame sexual fantasist. "It's
kind of like getting dressed for a party," she says, "and being
unsure of what to wear . . . and frantically trying on one image
after another like clothes."

    Baker, 35, lives in a small town in upstate New York with
his wife and child. The telephone is the way he communicates
with the outside world. "My business life seems to take place
over the phone," he says, in a pleasantly reedy voice. "I know
all these people and deal with them weekly on the phone whom
I've never met." Talking on the phone and reading have a
certain kinship: "The nice thing about reading a book is that
it is private, like a phone conversation; it doesn't matter what
you're wearing when you read it."

    An astute critic once said that the poet must be as in
love with the form of his sonnet as he is with the form of his
love. Nicholson Baker is as obsessed with language as he is with
sex. Vox is as much about wordplay as it is about foreplay.

    In a sense Vox illuminates the strange connections of
modern life, how people achieve intimacy at a technological
distance. Two hundred years ago, Vox would have been titled
Lettres and been an epistolary romance. Today people don't kiss
by the book but by telephone wire. The phone affords protection;
it literally allows us to save face. Vox proves once again that
the brain, as love doctors always tell us, is the sexiest organ.