B & Me Page 16

  But that’s not the setting either. Vox is mostly dialogue, but it’s not all dialogue. Significant hesitations in the exchange are indicated with ellipses or “There was a pause,” the first of these occurring around page ten and sticking out like a comma in Gertrude Stein. Slightly more elaborate breaks, brief descriptions of the crackle of the long-distance line, or noise resulting from the shifting of a handset from one ear to the other reveal the book’s point of view. Vox is told in the third person, but it’s not omniscient: There is no nineteenth-century narrator interrupting as events proceed, nor are we attached or limited to either Jim’s or Abby’s sensibilities. This makes it a kind of minimalism, and you can be forgiven, given the twentieth century’s periodic obsession with literary minimalism, for at first thinking that Vox might align with the aesthetic trajectory that shoots through Hemingway (masculine stoicism) and Raymond Carver (lower-middle-class emotional stuntedness). But that’s wrong. The setting of Vox does not require a reader to will belief in Spanish bullrings or dingy kitchens in rural Washington. Far more natural is the thought that came to me around page thirty or so: We’ve called in too, the price of the book was our two dollars per minute, we’re there in the chat room with Jim and Abby, hearing what we’d hear if we too had struggled to find others of like mind and had simply dialed and bounced into the conversation by mistake. Vox is a conference call. Its setting is wherever we happen to be when we read the book.

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  WHO SHOULD NOT BE FORGIVEN IS MARTIN AMIS. AMIS, WHO WROTE in his pan of Vox that the book “asks nothing of you,” and who claimed that “its slightness is inbuilt. It has no room to manoeuvre. It has no prose.” That’s flatly and demonstrably wrong, and to ignore its prose is to pass over a critical feature of the book. But even if it weren’t wrong, Martin Amis knows full well that there is a long tradition of books made up mostly or entirely of dialogue. Plato, for crying out loud. And Amis misses—or ignores—that the obvious precursor to Vox is not Hemingway or Carver (or even Updike or Sade). It’s Henry James. Before I sat down with Vox, or, more specifically, after Catherine and I returned from our walk along the Seine that morning but before I headed to the Métro, I read Henry James’s preface to The Awkward Age, which is composed mostly of dialogue and is the work of a writer who to that point was far better known for his elaborate prose. Amis should have made this association because he quoted from U and I, and U and I quotes James’s famous prefaces. (Maybe I’m being too hard on Martin Amis. After all, he didn’t choose to read Vox, he didn’t call in like I did—someone just handed him the phone. Anyway, it must be awful to be a canonical writer working in the shadow of an even more canonical father. It must be terrible to know that every time you excuse yourself from awkward cocktail party conversations, the person you’ve just left says to whoever remains, “Nice bloke, Martin—not his dad, though.” It must be awful to know that every woman you sleep with does so because she craves the seed of the truly great, now beyond reach, but which can perhaps be reconstituted from a watered-down specimen.) And the preface to The Awkward Age might just as easily serve as the preface to Vox. James insists on the seriousness of his ambition despite the appearance of “lightest comedy,” and he claims that the book draws its power from the pull of London social life. This circle

  was favourable to “real” talk, to play of mind, to an explicit interest in life, a due demonstration of the interest by persons qualified to feel it: all of which meant frankness and ease, the perfection, almost, as it were, of intercourse, and a tone as far as possible from that of the nursery and the schoolroom—as far as possible removed even, no doubt, in its appealing “modernity,” from that of supposedly privileged scenes of conversation twenty years ago.

  Like Emerson, James laments lost intimacy, but he believes it can be restored with “real” talk. Literature has always served this purpose: recording speech, and acting as a corrective to the tone of the schoolroom and the “supposedly privileged” conversation of previous generations. Two points are worth making here. First, it’s the obligation of all writers to shoulder up against the wall of the permissible and shove. Writers must shove no matter how large the obstacle and without concern for the strength of those pushing back from the other side. This shoving is made more difficult by the fact that those pushing back are very often the same shovers who moved the wall to where it now stands—they nudged it forward as far as they could stomach it, and cannot tolerate a millimeter more. James did his part. He was accused of indiscretion, and he was miffed when others picked it up from there. Joyce offends James, Lawrence offends Joyce, Miller offends Lawrence, Updike offends Miller, Baker offends Updike. This or a hundred other lists, each demonstrating that literature penetrates obstacles of taboo that shift with the generations, refreshing our sense of the intimate layers of ordinary human experience.

  Second, this work begins with wordplay. Does James hear the double entendre of “intercourse”? It’s hard to say, but it’s easy to say that “intercourse” was one of his favorite words. The Awkward Age uses “intercourse” nine times in contexts for which we’d now probably reserve “discourse,” as Barthes did. The oeuvre is remarkably consistent on this point. The Ambassadors also has nine “intercourses”; The Tragic Muse and The Wings of the Dove, eight each. The Bostonians, thirteen. The Golden Bowl, fourteen. Other common Jamesian words have undergone similar transformations. In James, to “love” someone means you like them a lot. To “make love” to them means you try to get them to like you back. To be “erect” is to be righteous and upstanding. To be “vulgar” is to be simple and obvious. And to “ejaculate,” for James, is to be so full of a sense of moral purpose that you simply can’t help blurting out whatever it is you have to say. This last is practically cited at the beginning of Vox. Before the book even really gets going, Jim ejaculates his description of his ejaculations:

  When I’m about to come, I seem to like to rise up on the balls of my feet. . . . I sometimes feel like some kind of high school teacher, bouncing on his heels, or like some kind of demagogue, rising up on tiptoe and roaring out something about destiny.

  To ejaculate is to passionately profess, to be a passionate professor. Vox does ask something of you, and what it asks, even in its first pages, is that you recognize that we should not—cannot, in any case—divorce “peeing and penises” from having something significant to say.

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  PARIS IS A PERFECT CITY FOR LOVERS BECAUSE IT’S A PERFECT place to fight. It’s a perfect place to fight because it offers perpetual disappointment. Paris is the only city in the world in which you don’t walk around endlessly mulling civic inadequacies, longing for some better city, but even when you’re in Paris, even as you gloriously recline on a wooden chaise longue inside the grounds of the Musée Rodin or happily stroll along an angular rue in the Marais, it’s possible to feel a great anxiety over the fact that you’re not in some other, even better part of Paris.

  The great Haussmann renovation of the nineteenth century is partly to blame for this, pitting old against new, but mostly it’s the Métro’s fault. As soon as Parisians no longer had to make the best of it wherever they happened to be and could nurse a reasonable hope that something better was just a short ride away, they climbed aboard. Of course wherever they went wasn’t as perfect as it had once been because whoever was responsible for its having been pleasant and desirable in the first place had left in search of a better lot. I was thinking of all this, of the blind celebration of motion that characterizes modernity, as I joked to Catherine that spiral staircases seemed to have played a crucial role in
the history of art and that what she should do is take an extended-exposure shot of me descending the atelier’s spiral staircase and call it Dude Descending a Staircase. Or better, wait ’til I’ve just sit-down showered in the kitchen and then call it Nude Dude Descending a Staircase. Or better still, because our staircase was less like a staircase than a poorly designed piece of climbing apparatus, Nude Dude Descending a Staircase and Practically Breaking His Neck. Catherine did not find this funny and she did not take a photograph. Nor did she agree with my analysis, which she suggested was passive-aggressive criticism of art and therefore her. This much was true. I’d become annoyed and negative in Paris because she needed me to be positive and optimistic.

  I discovered this on our fourth night, when I convinced her to attempt a dual reading of Vox: me Jim, she Abby. I’d been plotting this for a while. But we completed only a page or two before Catherine’s copy of the book went limp in her lap and she couldn’t proceed. “Male jerk-off fantasy,” she said. This led to a far-reaching discussion of the history of our intimacy, and she needed me to be more optimistic, she said, because that’s what I’d been when we began our letter-writing courtship. A Vox-like exchange, I wanted to scream! What she didn’t realize was that I had never been an optimistic person by nature—I had grown optimistic because of her, first because of the promise of the wonderfully rewarding life we might have together, and then because of the reality of that life. Anyway, I was optimistic—optimistic that Nicholson Baker could help us return to a wonderful life! For her part, Catherine could return to a wonderful life only if things started looking up. Things could look up in two ways: one, you could either usher into reality a relationship that had so far been limited to fantasies and words; or two, you could remove yourself from the former bed and breakfast and head to Paris, which was lovely in every way, including the way that demonstrated that setting alone cannot alter a relationship that has slipped into a spiraling dynamic.

  Ironically, for the entire time I was reading Vox—which is only one hundred and sixty-five pages long but which I had to read slowly because I couldn’t read it aloud in public (though I fantasized about standing on a Parisian street corner and ejaculatedly doing so)—Catherine and I argued about all the things for which the French are famous. One day I paid eleven euros for a bottle of wine, and Catherine protested because access to modestly priced good wine was what it meant to be in France, and we should refuse to pay a centime more than seven euros per bottle. Next we raged over food, and this time I was the one complaining because I thought being in France meant that you could eat pretty much anyplace and have better food than you’d have anywhere else. My mistake. One day Catherine refused to go to the brasserie on the corner even though she was hungry (and cranky) because under no circumstances should you settle for merely good food in Paris, and we didn’t find any great food until I was cranky too, which ruined our meal. Finally we went all out over sex. One afternoon Catherine came down the spiral staircase and accused me of having struck a Dying Slave pose on the futon (we’d just been to the Louvre). Long before, she’d claimed that I had “Michelangelo arms,” but what I needed to understand, she said now, was that, arms or no, such a pose created a pressure that was not conducive to receptivity. I launched a counteroffensive at this. I said that I hadn’t been striking a pose of any kind (actually I had), but if I happened to even remotely resemble the Dying Slave, then shouldn’t she be more grateful than upset? The fight that followed left me sleepless, and I stormed out of the atelier at two-thirty AM into a Parisian storm and hiked miles through the bad weather, wandering at first but heading generally toward the Eiffel Tower, the top platform of which occasionally peeked out between buildings as I walked off my anger. After an hour I found myself entirely alone with the world’s best-known monument to modernity and progress, the very progress of which Nicholson Baker had begun to grow suspicious. I made my peace with France, that wet and lonely half hour a visit to the grave of a life not lived.

  The following morning when Catherine and I separated in the Métro, she headed to the Place Vendôme to take photographs, myself to the Latin Quarter to wander and read, I caught a glimpse of her through a scratched train window and felt a spidery chill at the thought that it would be the last time I would ever see her. That night I had a terrible dream about Catherine having good grinding sex with someone else—perhaps the caveau bartender to whom earlier in the week she’d murmured a coquettish “Bonsoir . . .”—and I woke with her stroking my sweaty forehead and saying, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” What was wrong was that I loved reading Vox as much as Baker loved writing it—“I like it more than any of the others—I . . . love it,” he’d told Martin Amis—and I wanted to share it with her, because whenever we read a book that we love, our instinct is to attempt an impossible translation from private to shared experience. And the problem with that was that I couldn’t share this experience with her because she’d already decided, as many had, to dislike the book in exactly the way that, to my mind, demonstrated why it was an important book: because we all live in its background dystopia.

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  THEN AGAIN, VOX HAS SOMETHING OF A DUBIOUS HISTORY OF people attempting to share it, a history that I was surprised, once I finally heard it, wasn’t the first thing I’d heard about Nicholson Baker. For many people it may be the only thing they’ve heard about Baker.

  For obvious reasons Vox was the first of Baker’s books to receive a truly robust publicity campaign, and on publication it climbed to number three on the New York Times bestseller list and remained in the top ten for several months. This meant that many people who hadn’t previously read Nicholson Baker, people perhaps looking for “Rabelasian abandon,” read Vox. Among these, it’s safe to say, was Monica Lewinsky, the onetime White House intern whose affair with President Bill Clinton led to Clinton’s impeachment and tarnished the Clinton legacy such that it became one of a number of factors contributing to the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. It’s not known when or how Lewinsky became aware of Vox, but it is known that, toward the end of her affair with Clinton—­famously composed of about ten mostly oral encounters in or near the president’s private study, and, notably, a number of lengthy phone calls—Lewinsky gifted Clinton her personal copy of Vox and quickly purchased a replacement. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, 1997, she placed a personal ad in the Washington Post, a quotation from Romeo and Juliet about true love overcoming impossible obstacles. She cut out and pasted the ad onto a thin piece of cardboard that she gave to Clinton as a bookmark and later testified that she saw the bookmark in Clinton’s copy of Vox on a further visit to the private study. Clinton never admitted to having received the book, even when he was subpoenaed and pressured, and prosecutors later introduced into evidence an October 1997 inventory that listed Vox among the study’s collection of books.

  Surely it would be unfair to suggest that the so-called Lewinsky Affair, and all the history that sputtered along after it, can or should be laid at the feet of Nicholson Baker. Yet it would be just as unfair to ignore the fact that something like the Lewinsky Affair seems not to have been particularly far from Baker’s mind as he wrote Vox and The Fermata.

  That story begins about twenty pages after Jim’s ejaculations, when he confesses to Abby that the initial impulse to call 2VOX traces back to a moment in a video rental store about an hour and a half before he picked up the phone. Rentals rented (pornographic, of course), Jim tells Abby, he had been exiting the store when he noticed an elaborate display for Disney’s film adaptation of Peter Pan. A television was showing the film on continual loop, and Jim
happened to glance at the screen at a moment when Tinkerbell pauses midflutter and glances down at her small-breasted, big-hipped frame in a quite womanly way, an important distinction for Jim. Abby suggests that the sequence that follows, in which Tinkerbell tries to fly through a keyhole but gets stuck because her hips are too wide, is the inspiration for a scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in which Marilyn Monroe finds herself similarly lodged in a ship porthole. It’s this sequence of Vox, this association—from Tinkerbell to Marilyn Monroe, from children’s story to sex symbol—that serves both as the occasion of the book, the reason Jim calls 2VOX, and aligns it with Baker’s broader goal of challenging the age and genre boundaries that have chopped a chaotic network of flaws into the once-pure gemstone of literature.

  It’s not just Tinkerbell either—it’s Alice again too. Long before House of Holes repeatedly echoed Alice’s plunge down a hole to a wacky civilization, The Fermata, to leap slightly ahead here (and I should acknowledge that there’s absolutely no evidence that Monica Lewinsky read The Fermata), proposes that the basic template of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is all we really need to know about how reading and writing ought to work in the world.