494
PARTISAN REVIEW
wishing we were the man who'd written the book
Self-Consciousness.
Baker has made self-regard his subject and his substance. And all his
tiny
books, hanging upon tiny moments, have in fact a commercially
"high
concept": a single-sentence summary of their contents is their best adver–
tisement (from onanism to one-Updikemanship). Baker has the courage.
and the vanity, to make his own mind the theater and protagonist of ev–
ery one of his books, and to assume that its contents are worth the price
of admission.
Though not one of his admirers - tending to find long sentences eas–
ier to pull off than short, and oddities less difficult to portray than quiddi–
ties - I nonetheless confess that
Vox
has its moments. For one thing, the
form of the dialogue has forced Baker to abandon the impenitently man–
darin style that has become his trademark, and to work with a new di–
rectness and transparency that prove, in fact, highly workable. He
also
does, inarguably, have a gift, now and then, for seeing the mundane
with
such fresh eyes that he all but refashions it: when he likens the red and
yellow lights dancing along a stereo system to the nightscape of a city, I
realize that I will never look at a stereo system in quite the same way
again. When
Vox
is about words (for which Baker has an all but unre–
quited passion), or about secret domestic pleasures (which he has marked
off as his terrain; reading William James in a McDonald's restroom), when
Vox
is about intimacy, Baker can show off his zoom lens to good effect
The trouble is, however, that one man's explicitness is invariably like an–
other's, and as the book goes on, reproducing the arc of sexual excite–
ment, it inevitably grows less distinctive, and traces the trajectory
from
Philip Roth, say, to
Forum.
Though the novel is expertly paced and skill–
fully handled, it is finally about itself Its theme is its content, and shame–
lessness is its point.
By happy circumstance, though, another book came out recently that
is also short, intense, and exciting enough to be read in one sitting. Yet
Ron Hansen's
Mariette in Ecstasy
could not be more different from
Vox,
and not only because it is set in 1906, with an almost all-female cast, in a
French nunnery where women speak Latin. For Hansen creates a whole
zone of highly charged sensuousness, and a world so tremulous with
suggestion that every event has meanings both sacred and profane. The
privations of a convent are famously fertile ground for loose imaginations,
of course, and it is not hard to evoke a sense of ardor and passion play
amidst candlelit cloisters, young girls in white and a world of whispers.
Yet Hansen does much more than that: he creates so vivid a force-field of
energies that everything becomes almost unbearably charged with the in–
tensity and agony of longing: pivotal words - "yields" and "thighs" and
"tongue" and "hurt" - palpitate through the narrative, and the worship-
