Every day for the past year, I’ve been hearing voices. In the car, at home, in moments of exhaustion as I exercise. Some are more welcome than others: Toni Morrison reading her own prose is more spellbinding than pro football’s Terry Bradshaw narrating Beatrix Potter tales. But the hundreds of voices I hear as a reviewer of audio books aren’t always so easy to evaluate. The burgeoning, $2-billion-a-year audio industry still lacks accepted aesthetic guidelines, giving someone like me the rare chance to put on a Walkman and theorize.
When reviewing audio books, I often feel like I’m auditioning singers over the phone for an off-Broadway play. Like most listeners, I play audio books while doing other things–driving, working out, peeling potatoes–so a narrator who calls too much attention to himself or herself invites me to simply tune out. Conversely, even the most skilled, subtle narrator can’t rescue a paltry text. The most compelling audio books, I’ve found, offer a blend of voices–both the performer’s and the text’s–giving credence to the pleasing echo we hear inside our heads when reading printed material. The best audio books remind us that some books, unlike Victorian children, are meant to be seen and to be heard.
I listened to my first audio book several years ago, on a six-hour trip down Illinois’ interminable Highway 57. Until then I had resisted the impulse, secretly scorning the idea that reading could be transferred so seamlessly, collapsed into, say, a four-tape abridgement of “The Brothers Karamazov.” For years, the thought of listening to a book was akin to drinking a diet shake instead of eating a meal; supposedly all the necessary nutrients were contained in that single, convenient malt–but what about the giddy, anticipatory act of spreading out the napkin (book) on your lap and savoring the entre with your eyes?
On Highway 57, however, Chicago radio stations quickly fade into disconsolate bursts of static and the only scenery for miles is thick cornfields that look like they were plucked from a Willa Cather novel. I caved: Stopping at a dusty Book Warehouse, I bought an audio version (abridged) of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” Oscar Hijuelos’ passionate, lyrical novel about a family of immigrant Cuban musicians who end up on the “I Love Lucy” show.
Popping in the first cassette, I expected to hear some lead-in mambo or rumba music, then a narrator with an accented, mellifluous voice. Instead, a forbidding, decidedly Yankee tone filled the car: The unlikely narrator, whose name I’d failed to notice on the package, was mystery radio’s E.G. Marshall. It is hard to relate my chagrin at hearing his unwavering tones utter some of the novel’s more erotic epithets.
In the years since then, I’ve heard even more bizarre pairings, such as in a recently released anthology of Walt Whitman’s poetry that includes Burt Reynolds reciting “Oh Captain! My Captain!” Unwise castings like these make me wonder if the realm of audio serves as a haven for faded movie and TV stars–Ed Asner, Amy Irving, Diana Rigg–a sort of metaphorical soap opera or made-for-TV movie. But increasingly, in keeping with the industry’s exponential growth of the past few years, audio publishers are offering more ambitious productions, involving more en vogue actors such as Ralph Fiennes, Kathy Bates, Blair Underwood and Ed Norton, the latter having narrated last fall’s audio-only release of Tom Wolfe’s novella “Ambush at Ft. Bragg.”
Even more significantly, several magnificent releases in the past year convince me that some audio productions actually add a dimension to the original text or prose: Frank McCourt’s 15-hour-plus, unabridged “Angela’s Ashes” includes his rendition of his father’s off-key drinking songs and the taunts of Dublin classmates; Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Brother,” a memoir of her dying, Rastafarian brother, instantly becomes more immediate when she relates how her brother teased her about her British accent. And National Public Radio’s David Sedaris (“Naked”) proves a natural in “The Santaland Diaries,” his side-splittingly funny account of his stint as a Macy’s elf.
These days, whenever a friend or colleague ribs me about listening to books, even using the passe term “books on tape,” I point first to such performances as McCourt’s, Kincaid’s and Sedaris’, then to the statistics. According to a 1995 usage survey conducted by the Audio Publishers Association, 12 percent of U.S. households had used audio books in the previous 12 months. Major publishing houses continue to add audio branches, and retail chain stores devoted exclusively to audio books are popping up in major cities. The industry even sports its own magazine, AudioFile, a trade equivalent of Publishers Weekly, and presents annual Audie awards to outstanding productions.
But the most intriguing–and for some, comforting–research finding indicates that audio-book listeners also continue to read printed books. According to a survey conducted by a chain of audio-book stores, the average listener also buys three printed books a month.
It’s true, however, that audio books aren’t right for every occasion, and this relatively uncharted territory might require some etiquette rules. It doesn’t take an audio Dear Abby to know that listeners should try to match tapes with mood and activity. Listening to “Healing Yoga” during rush hour might be calming but impel you to assume the lotus position while driving through the fast lane; showing up weeping at a friend’s birthday party isn’t considerate, even if you have just heard Jacquelyn Mitchard’s (“The Rest of Us”) column on the death of her young husband. I’ve found it’s best at times like this to rein in one’s emotion before leaving the car or taking off the Walkman, to play the radio for a few moments as a buffer before moving on to your next activity.
But sometimes I make exceptions, and I don’t care who spies me hunched over in the car, crying or giggling or angrily exclaiming. Not long ago, I sat in the car at the grocery-store lot, listening to the final section of Toni Morrison’s amazing novel “Sula.” The title character has just died, and Nel, her friend from childhood, is leaving the graveyard. Morrison near-whispers the ending, mesmerizing, her voice resonating, repeating Nel’s cry–“girl, girl, girlgirlgirl”–reminding me who I am and why I’m alive long after I’ve turned off the engine and gone inside to the carts, the special on eggplants and the bright, bright lights.
