Vox(92)

How long did it take you to write the novel?

You’re not going to believe me, but . . . two months. May 23 to July 23, 2017. Granted, I’d written the short story of about 3,500 words in early May, so I had a skeleton to work with. But Vox the novel came together quickly.

In Vox, you’ve created two characters in direct opposition: Jean, who was politically inactive before the president came to power, and her friend Jackie, who attended every rally and protest. What did you hope to convey by their two extremes?

Jackie, even though she appears in the flesh later in the book, started out as a ghost. She’s the proverbial haunter, the nagging voice that says to Jean, “I told you so, kiddo” and “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Jean might never turn to activism and become a Jackie, but she does change over the course of the story; she becomes more like Jackie, while still retaining her own identity. We don’t all have to be carbon copies of one another to work on the same team, but we can learn things from other people.

What was it like to live in Jean’s head while writing Vox?

It was a special place to live in, and to continue to live in whenever I reread parts of Vox. Being Jean for a while let me experience a range of states and emotions—some familiar, some foreign to me. When I wrote her scenes, I was a mother, a wife, a woman with regrets, a woman with the power to cure a serious language disorder, a lover. And speaking of that last part—it really wasn’t horrible climbing into bed with Lorenzo.

Do you think Jean views herself as a feminist?

I think of Jean as a humanist, an egalitarian, a person intelligent enough to view all human beings as created equal. But here lies the rub—Jean takes this for granted. I doubt she ever entertained the idea that not everyone shares her viewpoint. To the extent feminism is a call for equality, then, yes, we can view Jean as a feminist.

Jean’s teenage son very easily embraces the Pure Movement. Why is his role in the book so important?

Steven shows us how malleable people can be, for better or for worse. As a teenager, his thinking (and his rethinking) seemed completely natural—he’s a kid, soon to be an adult, navigating a complicated system, a collection of new ideas still very much in flux, and trying to make sense of them.

Many of Vox’s most chilling moments involve Sonia, Jean’s six-year-old daughter, and the question of whether she’ll acquire language.

There’s a looming threat in Vox that we taste but never quite swallow. At six, Sonia is of an age when time is crucial—we could refer to this period as a use-it-or-lose-it stage. And I mean that very literally. Critical periods exist for various types of learning. The theory is that children’s brains are more plastic in early youth, but the circuitry changes as they reach puberty.

When I began studying linguistics, I read about Genie, a “wild child” rescued from abusive parents in 1970. Almost fourteen years of social isolation left Genie beyond hope of acquiring language. I’ve never forgotten her story, and my own fear and anger about poor Genie stayed in my mind from the first word of Vox to the last.

What do you want readers to take away from Vox?

A lot of readers are probably going to think of Vox as a feminist story. In many ways, it is. But I hope people also see this as a tale about oppression, about the horrors that can occur when a faction—any faction—with a specific agenda becomes so powerful that it’s unstoppable.

Although I wrote Vox as a cautionary tale, a warning call about gender politics and backlash and cultural shift, I also explored how much our humanity, our personhood, is tied to our ability to acquire and use language. In the book’s time period we never reach a point where the language faculty is wiped out, but that threat looms. What would our world look like if we (or some of us) lost the ability to communicate, to think, to express ourselves?

There’s also an exploration of cultural evolution, and we see this most in the conditioning of the main character’s children as they navigate the new rules, as they either embrace them or passively accept them.

I’d love readers to come away from Vox with two thoughts: (1) How easily can our world change while we’re not paying attention? And (2) How crucial to our being is the gift of language, that amazingly complex capacity we so often take for granted?

Which character in the book was most difficult to write?

I write quite a bit of flash fiction—in other words, extremely short stories, sometimes as little as a few hundred words. Flash lets me experiment with different voices and characters, so I’m comfortable moving from Lorenzo the Italian lover to Jackie the activist to Sharon, the down-to-earth, ever-so-smart farmer. Jean’s husband, Patrick, was tricky, though. I wanted him to be a fundamentally good guy, but also a passive man. Still, he’s smart. He’s the president’s science adviser. So his passivity had to be believable.

What compelled you to write Vox?

Vox began as a piece of flash fiction of about seven hundred words, for a contest with a doomsday theme. In it, I imagined a world in which a biological warfare agent spread rapidly, inducing a certain type of language impairment. The story, titled “Wernicke 27X,” illustrates what might happen if humans were suddenly incapable of speech and, consequently, of rational thought. It was terrifying.

When I found an anthology looking for fiction written by women and featuring female protagonists whose skills were central to the plots, I returned to “Wernicke 27X.” I asked myself how I could ramp up the terror, how I could expand on the idea of language loss—but only in half of the population. I took a long look at the current political climate, and found part of the answer there. So, Vox was born.