Reading is a lot like phone sex. A stranger whispers a scenario into your ear, and it’s up to you to decide whether it feels real enough to turn you on. Even when the writer’s metaphorical cock is inside you, the writer never knows for certain what you are feeling and vice versa. What you imagine from the words on the page is your secret, like an orgasm, and the best a writer can hope for is that both of you, writer and reader, are coming together.
Vox is a novel about phone sex but it is also a novel about the mystery of connection. The story begins when two anonymous callers — a man and a woman – are “connected” through a phone sex hotline (VOX) and start talking. What follows is a novel-length telephone conversation, probably the best conversation you will ever eavesdrop on in your life. Their conversation isn’t what we typically think of as phone sex; there is no talk of measurements like penis or breast size, and at least throughout most of the novel, no ‘phone sex’ actually going on. Instead, what is shared between them is those strange details: those objects and incidents, both real and imagined, that turn them on.
While there is no plot in a traditional sense, there is a wonderful tension to be found in the uncertainties. It’s hard to figure out what they want from each other. They begin to forge a secret language for sex — breasts are “frans,” penis is “delgado” and masturbating becomes “strumming” — which suggests that they want to be more than just solitary jerk-off partners. Yet, both are shy. They never reveal what city they live in or what they do for a living. Their names — Abby and Jim — only slip out at different points late in the conversation, seemingly by accident.
Midway through the novel, Abby suggests that they hang up, and call each other on their actual phones (the call at this point is getting expensive). But both decide that hanging up would be too much of a risk — whatever is happening between them is so fragile that hanging up may mean never speaking again. So as Abby and Jim’s conversation circles between fear and desire, we are left to wonder where the connection lies.
The pleasure of listening in on a 165-page phone conversation is not about anticipating what happens, but is about becoming lost in the details. Jim and Abby’s fantasies are bizarre, mundane, uncomfortable but always easy to imagine because they are very particular. Jim says to Abby, “There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there […] If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.” What allows the conversation to “survive” is not just Nicholson Baker’s meticulous eye for detail — the little green and black stars on Abby’s shirt, Jim’s unopened pair of small Deliques cotton pointelle tights, the way Jim smells like a Conte crayon. Jim and Abby’s fantasies survive in our imagination because they are always plausible, no matter how absurd they sound: Jim sending a memo with a single asterisk to his coworker for every time he thinks about her while jerking off, Abby sliding through a “luminous tube” as different hands reach in to touch her as she glides by, Jim watching a woman pleasure herself underneath an acrylic, blue-and-green plaid blanket with fringe. As we close our eyes to sense the itch of acrylic fabric or hear the sound of Jim and Abby’s voices on the telephone, we realize how what we need from a good book is also what we need from a sexual fantasy: clarity, detail, and the mystery of another person.
What I love about Vox is that it celebrates both reading and sex as solitary acts. Vox adeptly uses phone sex as a metaphor for the relationship between writer and reader. All Jim and Abby are to each other is voices in the dark. But as Jim notes, “verbal pornography records thoughts rather than exclusively images.” Unlike film, two people hearing the same story will always see different things. Jim is obsessed with the idea of female orgasms as secrets and when he talks about wanting to see inside a woman’s orgasm as if it were, “a foot-and-a-half-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension,” he is describing every writer’s desire to get inside a reader’s head and see what her or she sees. The end of the book is kind of a free-for-all: Jim and Abby finally consummate their conversation by groping each other in a version of Abby’s living room that only exists in their separate imaginations. But even more satisfying, is that Abby and Jim do not make a definite plan to have sex. Even if they meet in person, they both agree that masturbating together is enough for them, just as it is enough for us as readers. Through reading Vox, I will never know Nicholson Baker. But Vox shows us that sex and reading aren’t about having the same thought or becoming the same person; it’s about dialogue, exchange, getting swept up in the drift of another’s person’s story.
