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Audio Books: Worth hearing a writer's voice?
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Published: October 5, 2008
Updated: 10/04/2008 08:00 pm
Does listening to an audio book read by its author improve or detract from the presentation? Should most authors remain silent, leaving audio performances to trained actors and readers? In my own unscientific away, I set out to answer these questions by listening to two books read by their authors and another by an author whom I previously heard read his work aloud, now performed by an exciting contemporary actor.
Paul Auster's does not sound like a natural "radio" voice, which is how I still picture a rich and varied aural performance, even if I grew up after the heyday of radio announcers and performers. When I began listening to Man in the Dark (McMillan Audio, $24.95), I found Auster's raspy and unvaried voice initially off-putting. Auster, the award-winning postmodernist author of Travels in the Scriptorium and The Book of Illusions, is too good a storyteller to allow malingerers around his campfire. Soon I was fully drawn into the spell of an aging writer telling himself stories in the dark, and then experiencing, in the same voice, these stories fully realized as a sort of novel within the novel.
The device, which may sound gimmicky on the page, takes on an extra dimension when read aloud in Auster's rueful monotone, which seems perfectly suited for a character yanked out of 2007 and into an alternate, post-apocalyptic America where the culture wars have become real wars, and people are dying all around him.
Our hero is given an assignment, which is to kill the writer telling the story and thus restore cosmic balance to our future. Auster displays great skill in playing out the suspense within his invented tale, while using it as a counterpoint to the domestic drama involving the writer, his divorced daughter and his grief-stricken granddaughter, all sharing a Vermont cabin and with various problems to resolve.
Another reader might have been more skillful in creating different voices for these engaging characters, but Auster makes them gruffly real, even if his voice rarely modulates. This one isn't even a tossup -- Auster does better than any actor could in articulating his skewed imagination.
It's a different story with Katie Crouch reading her own Girls in Trucks (Hachette Audio, $29.98). It would help if this first novel read a little less like a memoir, even though Crouch swears in the press notes that it's not autobiographical. But the picaresque novel, plotless other than a character's journey to some sort of self-awareness, has a tough time in this era of literary personal confession, and even if Girls in Trucks isn't a memoir, maybe it should have been.
Crouch certainly seems to know the debutante world of Charleston upper-crust society, epitomized by the grand Southern matrons of the Camellia Society, who define and disturb the world of Crouch's heroine, Sarah Walters. Not that pretty, not that traditional and ultimately not that Southern, Sarah spends a long time figuring out the personal dynamics of those three truths.
Crouch reads Sarah with a casual insouciance, only using the drippy Charleston "sugah" in her voice when absolutely required for plot and character purposes. But her reading doesn't bring anything special to the work, certainly not in the same way that Auster's voice seems inseparable from the text. A trained audio-book actor might well have made Sarah's story more compelling, whereas Crouch makes it sound like a long, boring story about a friend we both don't really like.
My final test came with George Pelicanos and his new novel, The Turnaround (Hachette Audio, $29.98). I had previously listened to Pelicanos read his outstanding book, The Night Gardener, and was impressed by the care and detail he took in telling his story.
So I was particularly curious to experience another Pelicanos work, this time read by the actor Dion Graham, a standout on HBO's The Wire.
I was hardly disappointed. Graham is an outstanding audio performer, doing a variety of white and black characters and making each one vividly come alive. He takes Pelicanos' simple story of four individuals involved in an ugly racial incident in the early 1970s and the lingering effects on their lives 30 years later and turns it into a tour-de-force reading that made me wish I had read the unabridged version, rather than Pelicanos' approved shorter edition.
The bottom line? I think Auster is the exception rather than the rule, and most authors are better served by inventive and talented readers. But of all the audio books I've listened to lately, it's still Paul Auster's sleep-deprived voice that I hear as I drift off to sleep.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the UNC School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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