Readers will also be intrigued by how the novel will end when Jean is sent back to work and allowed to speak so she can actually produce her serum, apparently because the president’s brother has developed Wernicke’s aphasia after a skiing accident. They will quickly note that neither the limits on speech nor the government’s other repressive actions require any technology that we do not already possess - and use. These issues and the startling premise of “Vox” will keep readers engaged for at least the first hundred pages. Without words everyone - not just women - is limited. Jean feels that her husband, though sympathetic to her plight, is not speaking up because he needs to keep his job. But while women are its initial victims, “Vox” shows that everyone quickly becomes a secondary victim, pushed into cruelties, increasingly afraid of the totalitarian regime, and therefore self-censoring. Encouraged to alert the authorities of any infringements he sees, he points out next-door neighbor Julia - with disastrous effects.Īny woman who has been interrupted mid-sentence by a man, or sat in a meeting where male colleagues ignore her views, will respond to the 100-word-a-day hypothesis.
“Not my job,” he says when asked to pick up milk at the store.
Jean also has teen-age Steven, who is a hardliner. All the way up to one hundred.” Elementary arithmetic is useful for running a home reading is not. She is too young to have fully developed language skills, and with only 100 words a day, she will never do so.Īt school she learns sewing, cooking and “A bit of addition and subtraction, telling time, making change. Like all females, her 6-year-old daughter Sonia also wears a counter. More immediately she worries about her family. She partly blames herself, recalling that she had often been “too busy” to vote, and that when she was a student and her best friend Jackie was campaigning on women’s issues, she stayed home studying.
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