THE ROAD TO CONTENTMENT
By Don Aucoin
Reprinted from The Boston Globe
French novelist Jean Genet was one guy who knew how
to make productive use of confinement and monotony. During a stretch
in prison for his inveterate thievery, Genet buckled down and wrote
his first book, Our Lady of the Flowers.
Alas, in the two-hour prison that is my daily round-trip
commute to work, writing is not really an option, what with highway
safety laws and all. So, lately, I've begun to do the next best
thing. I read books on the way to work.
Technically, I listen to books on the way to
work. Way behind the technological curve as usual, I have finally
plugged in to the books-on-tape (or CD) phenomenon. There is no
zealot like a convert, and I'm fighting the temptation to shout
it from the rooftops: These audiobooks are a Boston bibliophile's
dream come true.
How do you turn routine drive time into a truly transporting
experience?
Just pop a good "book" into the tape deck.
Of course, by the time you read this, the newly completed
portions of the Big Dig will have solved our traffic woes. (Pause
for hollow laughter all around.)
But seriously, folks, traffic is likely to remain
one of our biggest headaches hereabouts and the lack of reading
time one of our biggest heartaches. Well, audiobooks make the former
bearable and efficiently cure the latter.
They are both exceptions to, and antidotes for, the
audio fatigue I described a couple of columns back. Since I began
this exercise in multitasking, I have "read" a book a
week - a pace I haven't maintained since college.
Moreover, I have done it while actually awake, rather
than in the nodding, all-comprehending moments before sleep. What
used to be the worst hours of my week have become some of the best.
All around me, the Southeast Expressway is churning
with the lunacy unleashed whenever Bostonians get behind the wheel
of a car, but what do I care? I've slipped away to another time
and place. I'm engrossed in the spectacle of Teddy Roosevelt pounding
his bully pulpit to bust the trusts in Edmund Morris's Theodore
Rex, or I'm tingling with suspense as Michael Capuzzo's Close
to Shore tracks the murderous course of a shark gobbling victims
off the New Jersey shoreline in 1916, or I'm wondering when the
existential frustrations of a deceptively placid middle-aged woman
will boil over in Anne Tyler's Back When We Were Grownups.
Look around your public library. Increasingly, unabridged
audiobooks are taking their place alongside the novels and nonfiction
books from which they're drawn, presenting us readers with what
are, in essence, competing versions of the books.
With a nod toward radio theater, they have become
a genre unto themselves. Admittedly, there are drawbacks to this
new form. While the printed word sits obediently on the page, allowing
us to linger over a lovely piece of writing or wrestle at length
with a complex argument, the spoken word does not. Nor can audiobooks
match the tactile pleasure of holding a book in your hands.
But at their best, audiobooks allow us to experience
familiar writers in a new way and, sometimes, to reappraise them.
Especially when the works are read by the authors themselves, they
are revealing in ways the authors may not have intended.
For instance, listening to the late Stephen E. Ambrose
narrate his book D-Day, complete with excited, gung-ho line
readings of dialogue of soldiers in combat, the almost boyish nature
of Ambrose's hero worship of the World War II generation becomes
apparent. One sees that gruff historian in a new light, remembering
that he was just a boy when the generation whose chronicler
he would become marched off to war.
Likewise, hearing David McCullough narrate his Pulitzer-winning
biography of Harry Truman, even a fellow admirer of Truman is struck
by how McCullough seems to give him the benefit of nearly every
doubt, from his years with the Pendergast political machine to his
use of the atomic bomb.
In other cases, author-narrated audiobooks provide
subtle new shading to the work. Rick Bragg's rich Alabama drawl
does more than give an authentic sense of place to Ava's Man,
his beautiful memoir of the grandfather he never knew; it also underscores
Bragg's determination to keep his family's storytelling tradition
alive as a way to resist the homogenization of the South.
There's an added bonus at the end of the Ava's
Man CD that no book could supply: the inflection, both deadpan
and sardonic, that Bragg brings to three simple words: "All
rights reserved." It gave me a belly laugh that sustained me
through a solid mile of Boston traffic.