What do You think about Vox (1998)?
Ok, so it's erotica, but about a thousand miles away from Fifty Shades ... at least until the end. It is essentially the inverse of a typical date. These two people start with the most intimate, weird, specific details of their internal lives, and in the telling of those things, they reveal some of the more mundane aspects of their personalities, vocations, and external lives. They (and we) never really know what the other looks like, what their voice sounds like, where they live, who their family is, and so on. We do learn their fantasies and fetishes, the very particular mechanisms of their arousal. Sure, it's sexual, but I found most interesting was how these most-hidden, least-discussed aspects can be so separate from their exterior lives, but still influence them so deeply. They think and feel and do things that no one who "knows" them has any sense of, yet those thoughts and feelings and actions are so close to the core of their beings. It seems like it should be a profoundly lonely experience, but it isn't. There is a good deal of silly-sexy that comes through, mostly in the absurdity of their fantasies, which keeps the whole book light, but there is a stronger core that runs underneath. Something about two strangers finding shared ground, in spite of a great distance (literal and figurative) between them. Perhaps I'm waxing a little too poetic about a book that's essentially pornographic, but what the heck. I liked it. Given all the strangeness throughout, I thought the end of the final scene was pretty standard/trite... which was weird. You'd think two people with extremely creative sexual imaginations would have gone somewhere new when fantasizing together... but perhaps "normal" was the new place for them?
—Kate
I've been wanting to read another book by Nicholson Baker ever since I read--and loved--The Fermata. This one isn't as striking or profound as I found that one, but an enjoyable read nonetheless. Still, I feel like he hadn't quite let loose yet. There is a bit of wordplay, creating new words (which, in a weird backwards way, redefine the meanings of the words they're replacing) for sex and body parts; however, it's not as deliciously fun and funny as it is in The Fermata. Vox is almost impossible to put down. A slim novel without chapters or page breaks, the conversation between two strangers on opposite coasts just flows--filled with random asides and strange erotic stories. Vox is a love letter to masturbation. This usually secret act is shared between two people and ultimately brings them (and maybe someday, THE WORLD) together temporarily.
—Chance Lee
I'll add my two cents to the small change of positive opinion about this book. I really liked it and think it's just about the cleverest erotica I've read. It's the only time I can recall laughing out loud while reading erotica, not because it was being ridiculous but because it was genuinely funny. The entire thing, if you don't know, is a phone sex conversation between a man and a woman who have never met, which involves several purely friendly and refreshingly literary digressions. I recommend it, even more so if you've got a special somebody to read it with.
—Bennet
