Recent Audiobooks

Over the last year-and-a-half, while I’m out to pick up my grandkids from school, I’ve been listening to audiobooks in the car. In the first few months of this year, I’ve listened to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (as read by the wonderful Mil Nicholson and available for free on Librivox), Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon, Patrick O’Brian’s The Yellow Admiral, Edna Ferber’s So Big, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

City driving is not the most conducive to paying careful attention to an audiobook: so many interstate entrance ramps, so many stop lights, so many intersections with no stop lights or stop signs whatsoever (a curious feature of Spokane streets), and, during one recent period, so many girl scouts selling cookies! I found my mind wandering a lot during Pendragon, but then I thought that it was not nearly so good as the first three books in the series (and the internet seems to agree with me). I found my mind wandering a lot during The Yellow Admiral, but then I thought that it was not nearly so good as the first seventeen books in the series (and again the internet seems to agree). Still, with so many hundreds of words just floating past me and not registering, I started wondering if I should just stick with music during the twenty-minute commutes. But then I remembered that I had been very focused on Our Mutual Friend, and it occurred to me that neither of the more recent authors is nearly so good as Dickens. (I haven’t consulted the internet on that question. I know I’m right.)

Over the last three or four weeks I’ve listened to two early twentieth-century books about people in small rust-belt towns, and I haven’t had any trouble following either one. I had heard that Ferber’s So Big, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925, was about a woman who runs a farm. And I suppose it is that, but it’s so much more. As I listened over the course of about three weeks, I heard about the shift in turn-of-the-century America from rural life to urban life. I heard about philosophical conflicts between money and beauty. I heard about birth and death, about happy marriages and unfortunate marriages. I heard about young people from more than one generation imagining what they wanted to do in life and then changing directions because of (or being changed by) unfolding circumstances. I heard about Americans of several generations acclimating to a culture of ad agencies, automobiles, celebrities, skyscrapers, fashion magazines, and world war. When characters learned to adjust, the book was heart-warming. When they didn’t, it was movingly tragic. I can see why it won the big prize, even though Ferber’s use of informal “you” drove me nuts. She writes at one point, “She smiled then so that you saw the funny little wrinkle across her nose.” Why couldn’t she just say that the smile drew a funny little wrinkle?

Have you (I know who you are, so that wasn’t an informal use of “you”!) ever looked at a list of American classic literature – say, the contents of the Norton Anthology that you bought for a college lit class or a beautiful list that your favorite high-school substitute gave you – and found yourself not sure you could remember which works were written by Upton Sinclair and which by Sinclair Lewis? Do Bret Harte and Hart Crane become confused in your mind? Do Robert Sherwood and Sherwood Anderson get smooshed together into some sort of hyphenated monster? I was thinking about this curious pattern in authors’ names just the other day, and that very evening we watched a Jeopardy! episode that included an “Authors Before and After” category! One contestant earned several hundred dollars for enunciating the very improbable question, “Who is Upton Sinclair Lewis?”

Maybe my confusion will resolve a bit now that I’ve finally been reading (i.e. listening to) Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. This set of linked short stories appeared in section III of Miss Engler’s list: “those works on a difficulty and interest level which require greater maturity on the part of the student.” A lot of sex happens in this book. A teacher is accused of pedophilia. A preacher enjoys peeping at a naked woman in the house next to the church. Several casual trysts occur. One man sends his wife away after he finds that she has committed adultery, and the woman’s mother brings her back to the husband’s house and takes off her (the daughter’s) clothes in front of him. Now I see why Miss Engler told us to wait! But she recommended reading books from section III in college, and I would have hated this book when I was college-age. I wasn’t lonely and desperate and didn’t know anybody who was (or, rather, didn’t know that they were), and I would have wondered why twentieth-century authors couldn’t all write nice stories like So Big about relatable, realistic, sympathetic people. I would have thought that Anderson (See? I remember which is which now! Robert Sherwood wrote that play about Lincoln) was saying that all people were desperate and lonely. I might have thought Anderson was telling me that people should be desperate and lonely because that’s all life can offer or deserves. I might have thought that Anderson himself was desperate and lonely and should have gotten some help instead of writing a book about “unrealistic” characters. Miss Engler just didn’t know how much maturity it would take on my part. I’m way past college age now; I’m even way past the age of teaching college. Finally I know that a lot of people feel isolated and defeated. I know that almost everybody feels this way sometimes. I know that authors don’t always approve of the characters they put front and center in their books; not every book is about a hero. And I have a lot more experience, by grace, showing compassion towards people with these problems instead of shock or disbelief or bewilderment.

I’m having one difficulty, though, in listening to Winesburg, Ohio. More disturbing to me than the characters are the narrators and their bizarre ideas of what an Ohio accent sounds like (one fellow thinks a Maine accent will do) and their weirdly overwrought dramatizations of the characters’ lines. I wish Miss Engler had said, “The works in section III will be suitable for you when you’re retired, but don’t listen to them in the car.”