SOURCE: Pritchard, William H. “Tradition and Some Individual Talents.” Hudson Review 45, no. 3 (autumn 1992): 481-90.

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...