On Audio Books: Prolonging the Pleasures of the Text
Roughly twenty years ago I was watching television with my two sons, one pre- and the other just barely pubescent, when an ad for the yet-to-premiere animated sitcom Family Guy interrupted our viewing pleasure. The sample of humor we were treated to involved a boy roughly my sons’ age emerging from a public restroom and exclaiming that it was a great place; it even had a machine that dispensed balloons. Ha. Ha.
My younger, less inhibited son wondered aloud why there would be a balloon vending machine in a men’s room, and what was so funny about that. I proceeded to explain that the machine sold a balloon-like item known as a condom that a man could put on his penis when having sex in order (1) to prevent the man’s seed from impregnating the woman he was having sex with, and (2) more importantly, as we were then living very much in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Eww, said the younger boy. A balloon on your penis to catch your seed. That’s so gross.
As I was not then, and have never been since, an advocate of abstinence education, this was not the impression I wanted to leave them with. Au contraire. I wanted my boys to have active, enjoyable, safe sex lives. Oh no, I told them. It’s not bad at all. For the man, in fact, the condom can help prolong the pleasure.
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Several years later I took a methods course for future teachers of middle and high school English. The stages of the writing process — brainstorming, outlining, writing a first draft, etc. — I have used frequently in my teaching and occasionally (okay, very occasionally) in my own writing. We learned a similar, if somewhat more opaque and therefore slightly less useful, approach to reading comprehension: the seven habits of effective readers — visualizing, activating prior knowledge, questioning, etc. I also remember that our instructor added an eighth habit of her own devising. (This was something she liked to do. For example, the step she added to the writing process was procrastination. This is something that, even jokingly, I never told my students.) Anyway, the eighth habit of effective readers she informed us comes into play when readers realize they don’t want the book they are currently immersed in to end.
I was reading fluently before I entered the first grade and have been enthusiastically plowing my way through the texts containing the world’s accumulated wisdom ever since, with a marked preference for fiction since adolescence. And yet, I had not then ever experienced the desire that a particular book would go on and on so that I savor its delights for the first time forever.
In this regard, I am an impatient reader. After I finish a book, no matter how engaged with it I am, I’m eager to move on and read other books, as opposed to those readers who like to go back to reread passages or perhaps even entire novels right away. Yeah, I can revisit certain books after decades and discover wonders my less mature mind was unable to grasp — I think of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in particular — or, more rarely, realize that I grossly overvalued the book in my youth. (A character I strongly, too strongly, identified with in my student years, Frederick Moreau, the bored, depressed, and lazy protagonist of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, now seems to me someone who just needs to get over himself. Of course, in Moreau’s — and Flaubert’s — defense, in mid-nineteenth century France neither psychotherapy nor psychopharmacology was readily available.)
In any case, when I read I prefer to devour a new and different meal rather than go back for seconds. I am habitually aware not merely of my progress through the book, but what percentage of the text I have read and how much I have left, a task my e-reader now performs with exactitude, along with the additional aid of telling me how much time it will take me to finish both the chapter I’m on and, with a simple tap of my finger, the entire book.
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Let us leap ahead to February 2021. While a pandemic spreads death, disease, and economic hardship around my city, my country, my world, I remain an essentially healthy man in his late sixties. Thanks to my age, I have even had the good fortune to be vaccinated twice against the current contagion. This contagion, by closing the New York City public schools, also forced me last spring to transition from semi- to full retirement, which gives me ample time to meditate, write, and take long walks around Brooklyn. (All right, now that I’m vaccinated I also volunteer once-a-week to package produce at a food pantry. You see, I am not completely devoid of a social conscience.) If I took the lessons of my meditation more truly to heart, I suppose I would walk silently through the oddly quiet streets and strive-without-striving to be aware of the present moment, but I don’t. Instead, I listen to audiobooks.
The book I am listening to at this moment in the dead of the New York City winter is Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The novel tells two alternating stories. One is that of Susan Ward, a woman from margins of Edith Wharton’s world (she is genteelly poor but of good family, well-educated, and artistically talented) who leaves her comfortable Hudson Valley home to marry a young man who takes her with him West where he aspires to make his fortune as a mining engineer. This is the plot of story number one, and I have tried to lay it out as quickly as I can. Story number two concerns Lyman Ward, Susan Ward’s grandson, the novel’s narrator, a retired history professor at Berkeley, retired prematurely due to a severe bone disease at the relatively youthful age of fifty-eight; he has gone to live in grandparents’ rural Northern California home (their final home, the home of their comparatively prosperous middle and old age after an early adulthood spent traipsing around the Northwest from one desolate mining camp to another), where he is writing the biography of his grandmother, mostly based on the letters she wrote to the great friend of her youth, a classmate who married a prominent magazine editor and thereby remained in the late nineteenth New York milieu of Wharton, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and such.
The point of this overly extended and yet painfully brief summary is that Angle of Repose is a very long book. And at no time was I in any hurry for it to end. And when it did end, I was disappointed. The narrative stops abruptly after recounting a climactic episode in Susan Ward’s marriage, although she and her husband go on to live for another thirty years. And Lyman Ward — her grandson the narrator — what happens to him? Does he return to live in Berkeley as his son and ex-wife are urging him to now that his book is finished and winter is approaching? Inquiring minds want to know. The Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, narrated by Mark Bramhall, published by Blackstone Audio.
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Weaving together tales from a vast storehouse of folk traditions, Scheherazade delays her death by keeping her audience of two (her husband, the cruel sultan who each night marries a virgin and the next day has her executed, and, oddly enough, Scheherazade’s younger sister Dunyazad, who acts like a vaudeville straight man — “How cold was it, Johnny?” — helping to set up each night’s narrative) enraptured by her interlaced stories until dawn breaks just before the climax of her current tale. She is the spinner of yarns par excellence, and her achievement owes much, I believe, to its orality. It is hard to imagine even the most cultured of sultans (and Scheherazade’s husband is said to be a highly educated man) willing to read chapter after chapter of a nearly endless novel. It is a literal human voice (and not what the teachers of writers’ workshops mean when they speak about voice) that enables her to build her labyrinth of fictions. At its rare, infrequent, highly prized best, this is what audiobooks do.
I first began listening to audiobooks perhaps ten years ago, and I looked down on them as essentially a lower form of reading, about as close to real reading as those Classics Illustrated comic books of my childhood were to actual literature. Mostly I listened to genre fiction, which in my case means what most people call mysteries or thrillers, but I prefer to think of as crime novels. By and large I stuck to the usual suspects: P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Dennis Lehane, Henning Mankell, Gillian Flynn, and so on.
Gradually I expanded my listening repertoire to include those great novels that I had for some reason failed to read, particularly British novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, and soon started to stumble toward my first great discovery in the esthetics of the audiobook. Tom Jones is a wonderful listen; Tristram Shandy isn’t. My first idea was that only novels that had a strong story element worked as audiobooks. However, while no one would deny that Morte D’Arthur (which, okay, I know is not a novel) is a work filled with stories, my mind began to wander almost a soon as I started listening, and I called it quits after submitting my ears to an hour or so of pointless chatter. (Indeed, it could well have been this version of the Arthurian legends that inspired E.M. Forster to write that “The king died, then the queen died” is a story but “The king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot.) Mallory, in short, is no Scheherazade.
Anthony Trollope, on the other hand, is an author who, for me at least, works better in the ear than on the page. (Dickens can be listened to, but is better read than heard, particularly such monumental achievements as Bleak House and Little Dorrit. These labyrinthine monsters out-Scheherazade Scheherazade herself, and it is hard enough to keep their characters straight on the page, let alone in the ear. Even after repeated readings or listenings. The exception to this rule is The Pickwick Papers, which I find unendurable in both formats.) While Trollope’s prose is rarely inspired, he does know how to create characters whom, if not as immortal as those of Dickens’, are at least easily distinguishable from one another, and to keep an entirely plausible plot ambling along at a steady pace. I base my claim that listening to Trollope is a more pleasurable way to experience his works than reading them on my experience. Because of the limitations of the Brooklyn Public Library’s audiobook collection, I listened to all six novels in the Chronicles of Barsetshire except The Last Chronicle of Barset, and all six in the Palliser series except for Phineas Finn. Unfortunately, when I attempted to read those two books, I discovered them to be discouragingly dull. Trollope read aloud could perhaps be listened to forever. Trollope on the page would be executed by this cruel sultan (me) first thing in the morning. (Trollope is the best of a small group of writers whose future may well depend on — or at least by greatly enhanced by — audiobooks. The others include Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Booth Tarkington, and Sinclair Lewis. Like Trollope, their prose is none too sharp and their narratives a little too diffuse, and yet their characters and the world those characters inhabit are well worth visiting.) The individual novels that make up The Barsetshire Chronicles and The Palliser Novels by Anthony Trollope, narrated by Simon Vance, published by Blackstone Audio. Listener beware: There is an audiobook entitled The Complete Barchester Chronicles, featuring many voices, published by BBC Audio; it is the complete recording of a BBC radio adaptation, and, while it offers performances by Leo McKern, Simon Russell Beale, and other luminaries of the British stage and screen, it is a radio dramatization, not a reading of Trollope’s novels.
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Why does listening enable me to enter a timeless realm I have rarely, if ever, found in reading? I don’t think it’s because listening is easier than reading. By the time most of us have achieved reading fluency (which, I believe, educators generally identify as a fourth-grade reading level), the decoding of letters into words has become such a natural process we are barely aware we are doing it, except perhaps when we are tired, and that is when sleep is more important for us than reading. And it is not because listening is more passive than reading. Consider the seven habits of good readers I learned in my old methods course: visualizing, activating prior knowledge, questioning, inferring, determining importance, synthesizing, and monitoring for meaning. All of these can and should be done while listening to an audiobook, although, I confess, monitoring for meaning, which involves stopping and repeating a passage, is one I do rarely, usually only when there has been a shift in setting or point-of-view that I missed because I was examining the sudden emergence of crocuses on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. (Bingeing on television shows, in contrast, is more passive than reading or listening, and possibly even more passive than sleeping. Sleepers, at least, fill some part of their rest with the creation of dreams.)
I believe it is the Scheherazade effect, specifically the presence of the human voice, that permits audiobooks to make a narrative worthy of eternity. In my life, listening to stories begins with the books my parents reading to me as a child, the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, invented by Hans Christian Anderson, and yes those adorable Little Golden Books. The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown was the first book I “read.” An aunt, an occasional babysitter, tried to dampen my achievement by pointing out, correctly, that I had in fact only memorized it, but my methods professor would many years later reassure me that memorizing is an important step toward actual reading.
Pacing is another factor that perhaps aids in my more easily experiencing timelessness in listening than in reading. The average reader reads about four hundred words per minute. Some people read considerably faster, but let me make it clear that I’m talking here about real reading, in which you decode each word of every sentence, and not so-called speed reading (which should be called fast skimming), in which you limit yourself to focusing only one key words. A comfortable pace of narration is two hundred words a minute. Listening is walking; reading is riding in a car. You don’t get to see as much of the landscape when you’re listening, but you do get to better observe the world you’re passing through.
Perhaps, dear reader, you were not as a child exposed to an oral tradition. You were not read to at bedtime, did not hear stories around a campfire, or offered folktales by a grandmother at hearthside (and, Lord knows, neither of my grandmothers had a hearth or any narratives to pass on from one generation to the next). Still, somewhere deep inside us all, possibly in our DNA or our collective unconscious (should such a thing exist), there is a desire to hear a voice recount for us adventures either fabulous or mundane. Oddly enough, in an age when our technology aspires to flood us with information, with data, with a steady stream of facts divorced from all context, when mechanically reproduced art is nearly the only art that many (most? all?) of us ever experience, the human voice retains its power to enchant. The radio announcers of my adolescence, with their mellifluous, almost exclusively male voices, knew this, and used it to draw us into their broadcasts on now-vanished (or transformed beyond recognition) progressive rock or listener-supported stations. With far too few exceptions, their heirs, the podcasters of today, fill my ears with too much pointless chatter, too little verbal magic. Except perhaps for those rare (though all too recent) moments when our republic itself seemed to be in peril, I’d rather listen to a book.
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About a year ago, I began to change my audiobook diet. Previously, I got all my audiobooks on loan from the Brooklyn Public Library and was beginning to scrape the bottom of its collection of classic novels and crime fiction. (That is, the very limited range of crime fiction I enjoy reading or listening to.) Then, I responded to an online ad for discount audiobooks, and now my email inbox daily receives offers to buy a half dozen or so items at five dollars or less a pop. Most of these volumes are of no interest to me. (They are not axes to break up the frozen lakes within us, but large plastic straws for sipping on excessively sweetened, chemically synthesized, barely alcoholic cocktails.) But some are extremely interesting. And quite a few have turned out to be extremely pleasant surprises, such as Stegner’s Angle of Repose. As a result, my audiobook consumption has become both more contemporary and diverse. (Stegner is contemporary perhaps only to a geezer like me. I was nineteen when Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972, and forty when its author died.)
The five audiobooks I describe below were all obtained through this discounter. You can probably borrow them from your local public library, but I do have to admit that the lure of inexpensive books that I can listen to at my own pace (and will faithfully wait for me whenever I do want to listen to them) is what led me to non-genre contemporary, again, contemporary to me, fiction. Should this essay somehow find its way to younger readers, I offer them a word of caution: Kids, I am an old man who reads for pleasure and enlightenment, not to pass standardized tests on a particular subject matter. You, on the other hand, are better off reading your chemistry textbooks with your eyes. Indeed, recent research holds that you are better off reading your textbooks on paper than on screens, although, as with all social science research, these findings are provisional and may in time prove to be entirely dubious.
Two additional caveats before I get to my recommendations. These are straightforward readings of texts, not dramatizations. I noticed, but did not read, an article in The New York Times that asserted radio drama is undergoing a renaissance during the pandemic. Maybe it is. But I have found myself entirely unable to follow dramatizations in my wanderings around the Borough of Churches. It is my guess that the supposed “golden age of radio drama" in the second quarter of the last century required families to gather around the mammoth radio receivers that dominated their living rooms and sit as quietly as they would (or should) during a religious sermon or classical music concert. My father, who was an adolescent during this alleged golden age, once admitted to me that the only thing he ever listened to on the radio (other than Edward R. Murrow’s reports from war-torn London) were the sporting events he was making book on, with mixed results, for the best minds of his generation at the Bronx High School of Science.
My second caveat has to do with celebrity readers. Avoid them. The best readers I find are experienced, but not famous or even voice-recognizable, actors who are able to read clearly and keep their personalities in the background. This does not mean that all the voices are the same. It is altogether appropriate for the ethnicity of the reader to match the ethnicity of the original writer, particularly if that ethnicity is an important element in the book. I realize that all the books I have chosen to write about below are by more or less contemporary Americans. I’m not sure why. But I believe that despite their being by Americans, they represent a diversity of content, style, form, and voice, in all possible meanings of that term.
Augustus by John Williams, narrated by Robin Field, published by Blackstone Audio. Along with the works by Trollope and Stegner cited above, this is the only novel I’m going to plug that was written by a dead white male. Indeed, this book won the National Book Award for fiction in the same year, 1972, that Angle of Repose nabbed the Pulitzer. While Williams’ earlier novel Stoner continues to have a small but devoted readership for its clear-eyed depiction of the triumphs and travails of an English professor at an obscure Midwestern state college, Augustus, despite its endorsement by the NBA, seems to me largely forgotten. I believe it is an even more interesting depiction of ancient Rome than Robert Graves’ much better known I, Claudius. (Graves’ Claudius, I believe, owes its reputation to the brilliant BBC mini-series of the mid-seventies with Derek Jacobi’s magnificent performance in the title role.) This is not the sort of novel I would expect to work as an audiobook. A different character narrates each chapter: Augustus (of course), Mark Antony, and Ovid, along with a host of less famous people who touched the emperor’s life. The result, however, is anything but confusing. Rather, the listener gets a three-dimensional view of a complex, powerful man who held on to that power largely by focusing on his duty (which he saw as remaining emperor as long as possible in order to keep feuding factions at bay) rather than personal happiness. (In choosing duty over happiness, Augustus, the most powerful person in his world, oddly enough resembles the frustrated academic Stoner, one of the least powerful people on his campus.)
The Mothers by Brit Bennett, narrated by Adenrele Ojo, published by Penguin Random House. Britt Bennett, born in 1990, is the youngest writer in this brief roundup of audiobooks. She has not yet won a major literary prize although the well-deserved acclaim received by the novel she published last year, The Vanishing Half, may well change that. Her debut novel, The Mothers (2016), shares several of the themes of The Vanishing Half, particularly in its focus on the comforts and constrictions of living in a tight-knit, highly insular community. The community here is the congregation of a Black church in San Diego. The plot centers on Nadia, a bright and beautiful high school student whose senior year is marred by two difficult events: the suicide of her mother and Nadia’s subsequent out-of-wedlock pregnancy. There are several key mothers in the story: Nadia’s mother Olive; Nadia herself; Lorraine, the mother of her boyfriend (and wife of the Black church’s pastor); the feckless mother of Nadia’s best friend (and Lorraine’s protégé) Aubrey; and, finally, Aubrey herself. But while I was listening to this book, the mothers I had most in mind were the group of elderly female congregants who function as a sort of Greek chorus, speaking in the first person plural and commenting from time to time on the action, alternating between strong empathy and moral outrage. The result is a powerful story of sympathetic yet flawed people attempting to come to terms with love, loss, and betrayal.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer, narrated by Robert Petkoff, published by Hachette Audio. “Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard,” according to the probably apocryphal dying words of the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean. I would add that reviewing tragedy is easy (you can just give a bare-bones account of the plot of Lear or Hamlet; very sad), but reviewing comedy . . . If I were to tell you the plot of Less, you’d probably shrug your shoulders and wonder, like my young son at the promo for Family Guy, what’s so funny about that. And yet Less is that rare achievement, a comic novel that is actually funny. What’s more, it is funny even though it’s a novel about a novelist, a far from promising subgenre. Arthur Less, a middle-aged, mid-career writer who has so far enjoyed a middling success, finds himself confronting a mid-life crisis on two fronts: first, his publisher has just rejected his most recent novel, a nostalgically mournful journey through Less’ lost San Francisco young adulthood; and then, his boyfriend of nine years announces he about to marry a younger man. So Less chooses not to confront either problem and instead embarks on a round-the-world tour and accepts all of the invitations he has received from abroad. Including speaking at a conference in Mexico, attending an awards ceremony in Italy, teaching a semester in Berlin, etc. And yes, the yuks keep coming non-stop. Ultimately, Less sees that he must stop looking back in sorrow but start gazing forward with comic warmth. The result, one hopes, will be a novel very much like this one, which won the nod from the Pulitzer gang in 2018.
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz, narrated by Peter Berkot, published by HighBridge Audio. In general, I believe the less you know about a writer, the better off you are. Does it help to be told that Britt Bennett grew up in San Diego, that Andrew Sean Greer has an identical twin, or that John Williams obtained a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri? Probably not, or not enough. In contrast, I do find it interesting that Wallace Stegner came from a far more hardscrabble background than the narrator of Angle of Repose. And in the case of Hernan Diaz, it is useful to be told that this Buenos Aires-born writer and Manhattan-based Borges scholar passed part of his boyhood in Stockholm, where his leftist father fled to escape Argentina’s military junta. Set in the nineteenth century, In the Distance tells the story of a young Swedish man who sails to San Francisco in search of his older brother and continues his quest traveling eastward through a West populated by a wide range of stock characters – prospectors, prostitutes, outlaws, religious fanatics, and Native Americans, among many others – portrayed in completely new ways. Deservedly, the book was shortlisted for Pulitzer that Less received.
American Woman by Susan Choi, narrated by Emily Woo Zeller, published by Blackstone Audio. Okay, another biographical tidbit. Susan Choi’s father was a Korean immigrant. The central character here, Jenny Shimada, is the daughter of a Japanese immigrant, and the title of this book is bitterly ironic. Jenny feels isolated from both her Japanese heritage and the American society of the nineteen-seventies in which this novel is set. Jenny is also alienated from the self-styled revolutionaries who involve her against her will in the kidnapping of a Patty Hearst-like heiress. The novel uses this ripped-from-the-headlines tawdriness to propel its plot while at the same time transcending this tabloid premise to explore a complex character’s coming to terms with her own identity. Susan Choi, whose excellent Trust Exercise received the 2019 National Book Award (I read that one), is one of the few authors I’ve pursued listening to, with entirely satisfying results. The three titles I’ve listened to form a sort of immigration trilogy. Like American Woman, A Person of Interest (2008) employs a ripped-from-the-headlines premise; in this case, an immigrant mathematics professor from an unnamed Asian country (which the savvy reader will have no trouble identifying as Korea) is a suspect or, in the preferred FBI lingo, a person of interest, in a series of Unabomber-like killings. Set in the fifties, The Foreign Student (1998), presents the story of a young Korean man, who after suffering at the hands of both communist and anti-communist forces in the Korean War, hopes to find some peace on the campus of a university in the American South. I am not sure what Choi does to make these such exemplary listens (and I’m not sure if Trust Exercise, with its tricky framing and reframing of its plot would work as well as a listen), but in these three books she does Scheherazade proud.
David Ghitelman is a graduate of Antioch College and the University of Iowa. His poems have appeared in Agni, The Antioch Review, the Black Warrior Review, the Iowa Review, and New Letters. He has written essays and book reviews for the New York Times, Newsday, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His fiction has been published by Every Day Fiction.