SOURCE: Loose, Julian. “Keep Talking.” London Review of Books (26 March 1992): 18-19.

In the following review, Loose provides a favorable assessment of Vox and an extended discussion of Baker's previous writings.

Howard Rheingold, in his recent Virtual Reality, explained the idea of ‘cyber-sex’: how someday we will be able to don sensor suits, plug into the telecommunications network and ‘reach out and touch someone’ in ways entirely unforeseen by Alexander Graham Bell. Speculating about the impact of such artificial erotic experience, Rheingold turned to an already up-and-running technology—to ‘telephone sex’, the adult party lines where you pay to make conversation with a member of the preferred gender. While the UK attempts to shut down such hi-tech services, in America they are already writing academic papers on ‘Sex and Death among the Disembodied’.

And as the gold-embossed cover helpfully explains, Nicholson Baker's new novel Vox is also ‘about Telephone...