Audiobooks are a gamble. Best-case scenario: the words on the page are activated by a commanding narrator who takes reasonable creative liberties and imbues the work with deeper meaning. Worst case: 11 hours with a voice resembling Siri.
Jennifer Egan’s novel The Candy House—a tapestry of interwoven stories, each one told from the point of view of a different character navigating wildly different circumstances—transitions seamlessly into an audiobook. If anything, the multinarrator form is enhanced through the recording’s chorus of more than 20 voice actors. Egan, who helped select the cast, says the choice to use multiple readers stemmed from the substance of the book, which tells the stories of strikingly distinct characters who are bound together by a new, fictional technology. “I don’t write fiction with the thought of an audiobook,” the writer explains. “[But] storytelling began as an oral tradition, after all, and I see myself as part of that tradition.”
The audiobook opens with the warm, booming voice of Bix Bouton—the tech icon whose memory-recording software, the Mandala Consciousness Cube, lurks throughout the novel. Unsurprisingly, the technology is divisive among characters—and even, ironically, Mandala creators and employees. In the audiobook, this ambivalence is expressed through tone: Bouton’s voice oscillates between that of a salesman trying to pitch his wares and that of a rueful father, concerned about the impact his technology will have on the world his children will grow into.
The pervasiveness of Mandala is also evident in Lincoln, an analyst at the company who speaks almost entirely in nervous, staccato permutations as he tries to formulate the perfect equation for human behavior that will attract his uninterested coworker. Lincoln refuses to address his underlying feelings—for instance, the pain of unrequited love or the value of the precious personal memories he sifts through at his day job. But in the audiobook, through the performance of the voice actor, the listener is able to discern Lincoln’s small, fluttering voice. The one that holds loneliness, fear, and doubt. It’s not what Lincoln says but how he says it that matters.
The audiobook proves uniquely insightful again when the listener encounters Lulu, an undercover spy for Citizen Agent, a powerful government agency, who covertly surveils a wanted man while island-hopping in France. The chapter is read by an expressionless woman speaking entirely in the second person through a series of commands. The narrator, understood to likely be a director at Citizen Agent, has a grating chip like a chatbot and, even when Lulu’s situation becomes dire, shows no inflection. As Lulu lies dying on a speedboat after a violent encounter with her target, her memory is stored in a device planted in her leg by the agency. It’s Lulu’s stored information (or personal data) that Citizen Agent wants, not the body itself. Lulu is a mere vessel for the narrator, whose chief interest is producing good work for the agency. However, to the listener, the narrator’s apathy is appalling.
Listeners first hear Miranda Kline’s drawl when she is impersonated by her daughters, Lana and Melora. They recount their mother’s ascendence as she emerges from the shadow of her ex-husband to become an acclaimed anthropologist whose research later inspires Bouton to create Mandala (much to Miranda’s chagrin). Miranda’s voice, like her research, is slow and cautious. However, her voice changes as she distances herself from her daughters, becoming increasingly distracted and hollow as time progresses, as if she, too, were composed of algorithms. As Lana and Melora’s frustrations with their mother obfuscate her intended tone, the listener is reminded that, like narrators, audiobooks are inherently biased. Bare words on a page provide at least some room for interpretive freedom, but with audio, the reader cedes the right to the voice inside their head to the actor.
Still, audiobooks can also empower a reader or listener in ways text cannot. In “See Below,” a long chapter consisting entirely of email threads, the cacophony of nearly 10 voices adds much-needed texture and humor to the impersonal nature of digital communication. When read aloud, email sign-offs and signatures are infused with just as much personality as the body of the note itself. The multitude of narrators affords the listener the liberty to roam as a free agent, no longer monogamous to one voice. A character who might be unappealing on the page has the opportunity for redemption through the choices the voice actor makes.
For instance, listeners may cringe at the interior monologue of Molly Cooke. The awkward tween’s failure to navigate the social hierarchy at her country club is painfully relatable. But her squeaky soprano is adorable. In one scene, Molly goes into the locker room in an attempt to save herself from public humiliation by Stella, her frenemy and the presiding queen bee, and overhears a heated conversation (spoken in adult voices) between two women who have just finished playing doubles tennis. Hidden behind a wall and unable to see their faces, Molly must make her own judgments about the nature of the women’s relationship. But later, as she thinks the scene over in her head, it becomes evident that Molly does not understand what she has just witnessed. The listener is saved from the difficult experience of sitting alone with Molly’s realization of the brutal realities of adulthood and instead can relax in the sweet nostalgia of youth, emphasized by the girlish voice of the narrator.
Unable to see the words on the page—and thus blind to indicators like commas or ellipses that would signal tone—listeners rely on the nuances of an actor’s voice to understand the book’s innuendos. By its very nature, the audiobook offers greater emotional resonance because it appeals directly to the senses. Sound triggers a more immediate response than the process of reading. Yes, this means that audiobooks can be emotionally predetermined. But a successful audiobook can also transcend its form to become something else: theater. And that’s worth 11 hours.•
Join us on October 19 at 5 p.m., when Egan will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Ivan Kreilkamp to discuss The Candy House. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
SWEET FORGETTINGS
Author and critic Priscilla Gilman writes about the themes of technology and memory in The Candy House and other novels by Egan. —Alta
WAY TO SAN JOSE
Journalist Gary Singh reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A Mystery, A Memorial, saying that the memoir “pursues in heroic fashion the redemptive power of the writing life.” —Alta
18 NEW RELEASES
Here are exciting books by authors of the West that are publishing this month. —Alta
END OF SCREENWRITER STRIKE
After 146 days of striking by more than 11,000 screenwriters, the Writers Guild of America has reached a tentative agreement on a new contract. —New York Times
“A POORLY TRANSLATED FORM OF GRIEF”
Prior CBC author C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey) writes about re-creating her grandmother’s recipes, after her grandmother’s death, and the comfort of eating badly. —Esquire
BOOK FESTIVAL TURNS 24
San Francisco’s beloved Litquake kicks off this week and ends on October 21. The opening-night party is Thursday, October 5, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. —Litquake
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