[In the following excerpt, Pritchard offers a favorable review of Vox, praising the “finely-tuned conversational sentences” and “inventive words.”]

The most original and ambitious novel published earlier this year was Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach, about which I've had my say in another place. After Stone, the two novels that seemed to me most fully realized and distinct are Nicholson Baker's Vox and Caryl Phillips' Cambridge. Baker is thirty-five, Phillips thirty-four; Baker is a WASP and Phillips is a West Indian educated in Britain. It would be hard to name two novelists who, except for their youth and the fact that they've each published three previous novels, have absolutely nothing in common except a way with writing. Compared to these works, the other novels and stories considered here, intelligent and engaging as to various degrees they all are, feel a bit subsidiary. Not a masterpiece in the lot—which is surprising, since someone in the New York Times Book Review manages to find a new one each week. But the variety and entertaining liveliness of their different styles and subjects reminds us again that contemporary fiction—a lot of it, anyway—is still written for adults and provides satisfactions not to be disdained.

Reference to “adults” seems to have gotten me into Nicholson Baker's little tour de force about phone sex. Until some months ago I'd never heard of Baker but then was teased into reading his U and I because of its subject: the novelist's obsession with the work and character of John Updike. U and I is a gem of a book, wonderfully rereadable, containing something verbally interesting in just about every sentence. Here is an instance: Baker is admiring Updike's aplomb during a Dick Cavett television interview, comparing it with his own (Baker's) relative ineptitude. Updike's performance was one in which “he spoke in swerving, rich, complex paragraphs of unhesitating intelligence that he finally allowed to glide to rest at the curb with a little downward swallowing smile of closure, as if he almost felt that he ought to apologize for his inability even to fake the need to grope for his expression.” Then Baker remembers a documentary about Updike in which

as the camera follows his climb up a ladder at his mother's house to put up or take down some storm windows, in the midst of this tricky physical act, he tosses down to us some startlingly lucid little felicity, something about “These small yearly duties which blah blah blah” and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs on a ladder!

If you warm immediately to this you'll want to read Baker, all of him. His first two novels are The Mezzanine and Room Temperature; all four books are short, published within the last four years, and yielding a high intensity rate per page.

As Deborah Garrison pointed out in her fine review of Vox in The New Yorker (“Phoning It In,” March 9), Baker's “obsessive thoroughness,” his fascination with every nuance of human desire and response, is “intrinsically seductive”—sexy, even; thus in hindsight the explicit treatment of phone sex could have been predicted. As everyone knows by now, this is a novel in which a man and a woman talk each other off, long-distance. At one point the man, speculating on the difference between written and visual porn decides that “I guess insofar as verbal pornography records thoughts rather than exclusively images, or at least surrounds all images with thoughts, or something, it can be the hottest medium of all.” Vox is a hot medium full of art: finely-tuned conversational sentences; inventive words for private parts (“frans” for breasts, “crank” and “Delgado” for penis); some quite impressive sexual fantasies, and, as it were, a potent conclusion. (Since this is a family magazine I desist from quoting further.) It's an art that manages to be sexy enough so that one is just slightly embarrassed to be caught listening in on the proceedings. Would John Crowe Ransom or Yvor Winters or F. R. Leavis approve? Perhaps not. The only novel I can remember feeling in this double art-sex way about is Terry Southern's Blue Movie (more about Southern later). So although I'm aware that a number of good readers, both here and in England, have been unamused and unimpressed by Vox, I put myself firmly in the yes I will, Yes, column.