RSL / Jane Hamilton Audio Book Reviews
Two more Robert Sean Leonard-narrated audio books. Perhaps the only advantage of a long commute.
Disobedience (Jane Hamilton, rec. 2000)
The story: This was a strange, frustrating, sometimes boring and sometimes intensely uncomfortable book. Narrator Henry Shaw, 17, son of pianist Elizabeth ("Beth") and American History professor [whatever his father's name is] and sister of tomboy/pre-teen Civil War reenactor Elvira (who goes by "Elvernon" on the field), has virtually no identity outside his relations with his family, which is why I've listed them first. Henry is obsessed with his mother, whom he often calls "Liza38" after the screen name he created for her when he set up the family's computer network. Related many years after the fact, most of the book focuses on Liza38's year-long affair with a Wisconsonian violin-maker (the Shaws live in Chicago, having moved from rural Vermont, which Henry misses terribly) as witnessed through a torrent of passionate emails they write to each other that Henry reads and archives without her knowledge-as the Shaw IT professional, he knows her password. Liza38 this, Richard Polloco that, Beth and Richard blah, blah, blah, interspersed with tales of Elvira/Elvernon's escapades at reenactments, his mother's regular book club meetings, and his own struggle to come to terms with his mother's secret.
We hardly hear anything about Henry that doesn't have to do with Henry-seeing-his-mother or Henry-thinking-about-his-mother or Henry-watching-his-parents-interact or Henry-observing-his-sister's-quirkiness, etc. The scenes we do get of Henry on his own, or with his friend, or with his long-distance girlfriend, are almost exclusively the best in the book. (Other highlights include some of Henry's rejoinders when he channels his anger into sarcasm and brute honesty, and his increasingly absurd interactions with members of the book club.) But even those are overshadowed by The Affair; in bed with his girlfriend, to cite the most disturbing example, he imagines in vivid detail the violin-maker stroking between his mother's legs and whispering endearments.
The questions I asked myself again and again as the tapes droned on were, Why are we listening to a book about a woman's affair when the narrator is her son? and Why not have a book about an affair narrated by one of the people having the affair, or a book about a kid where his mother's affair features but doesn't overpower his own story? The best answers I could come up with before the end were that (a) it's simply a case of a growing young man becoming aware of his parents' and his own sexuality, albeit in an odd, obsessive way; and (b) if Beth had been the narrator, we wouldn't have seen her affair's effect on her family because she didn't see it herself.
Then with the last lines of the book came, if not an explanation, at least an acknowledgment by the author of this awkward focus. After saying that he could have chosen to tell this story from a different viewpoint-say, his cuckolded father's-Henry closes the book with the lines, "But the only story I want to tell-the only one I seem to have in me-is this one. It is always about her." Beth Shaw dominated her son's life, whether she meant to or not, and so she dominates his book. It may not have been enjoyable, but it sort of makes sense.
RSL's reading: For at least the first half of the book, RSL read in a voice that, if I liked him less, I might call flat. He perked up somewhere in the second half, though, as Henry began to rebel, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that his earlier monotone was intended to reflect the character's teenage apathy.
Best moment: An exchange between Henry and an inebriated book clubber who fawned over his "perfectly amiable" self. During this short speech, which ended with, "It's like Jane Austen. I love it. I love it!", RSL sounded like Kevin Spacey-as-Lester Burnham being silly in American Beauty ("For you, Brad? I've got five!").
* * *
I'd never read anything else by Jane Hamilton, so it was hard to tell whether I disliked her writing or just this particular novel. Since RSL did another audio book of hers, The Short History of a Prince, I borrowed that one from the library next to find out. An excellent, excellent decision.
The Short History of a Prince (Jane Hamilton, rec. 1998)
This book. So enjoyable.
This time our narrator (third person limited POV) is the sensitive and sympathetic Walter McCloud.* Told in alternating sections taking place twentyish years apart, the story relates the events of two seminal years in Walter's life: 1972/3 when he is fifteen years old and living in Oak Ridge, Illinois, attending ballet classes, in love with his friend Mitch, and watching his brother die of Hodgkin's disease; and 1995/6 ("the present") when he's 38, teaching English for the first time at a small high school in Otten, WI, longing for a man he'd fallen for in New York and inadvertently alienated, and waiting to find out what will become of the McCloud family home that he loves deeply when his aunt announces that she wants to sell off her shares.
* Was it a common Midwestern practice in the '60s and '70s to give babies names like Henry and Walter, or is it just a Hamilton quirk to saddle her protagonists with names that are too old for them?
Again, our young hero defines himself in part through his family-his mother, Joyce (whom he, like Henry, oddly refers to by first name), father, Robert, and brother, Daniel-but he also nurtures close relationships with dance-school friends Susan and Mitch, and most strongly identifies himself through his love for ballet and his homosexuality, so we are dealing with a fairly independent, self-aware young man. The eccentric older women exerting influences on the narrator's life are here, too, in the form of aunt Sue Rawson, who introduces Walter to ballet when he's nine and mentors him in music and performance appreciation throughout his childhood and adolescence, and his mother, who's thankfully more removed, tolerant and well-adjusted than Liza38. But for all that they are integral to Walter's own story, they never come close to eclipsing it.
The passage that alerted me to the fact that this book would soar above Disobedience came in the first chapter, in a scene in which the younger Walter describes his thoughts on ballet and gender identity while watching Susan dance in his living room:Going to the ballet had always inspired conflicting emotions in him. He wanted, often in quick succession, to be the girl, wanted to be the girl with the boy, wanted to love the boy, wanted to be the boy, wanted again to be the girl. It was a confusion of endless change and pairing.
It's a sentiment Walter revisits when he watches Susan together with her then-boyfriend Mitch, imagining himself in her place, and when he dons a Swan Lake tutu to see what it's like to dance the woman's part.
The conflicts aren't quite what you might expect given the subject matter. Walter knows he's gay from the beginning of the story, so there's no sexual identity crisis (though there is a touch of homophobia from others); he knows he's in love with Mitch, though Mitch makes fun of him for being gay, so there's no struggle to come to terms with his feelings, only a longing for Mitch to reciprocate; he knows he isn't great at ballet and that it won't take him very far despite his passion for dance and music, so the question is only how long it will take for him to give up and whether he'll have any triumphant moments along the way; and he knows his brother is dying, so there's no suspense as to whether Daniel will recover or succumb to his illness, only the wait for the inevitable.
This isn't a bad thing. It works well. It's about Walter, his relationships and his internal life. The story's structure supports dramatic tension most of all; having seen what's going on in the present, we know that certain things will happen in the past before they're explicitly revealed. We know that something happened between Walter and Mitch that year, so we wait to find out what; we know that Daniel died, so we wait to see how his final months went; we know that Mitch dropped out of ballet training in spite of a full scholarship to an excellent school, so we wait to find out why; etc.
Before I give any more away, let me say that this is a well-paced, well-written story with a likeable main character, believable emotions and just enough plot to be interesting without tipping into melodrama.
RSL's reading: RSL sounded so much younger in this recording than he did in Disobedience that I wanted to call him "Little RSL"; then I saw that it was done only two years before the other, which is puzzling. Maybe it was the sound balance. Maybe this was one of the first audio books he performed, because his voice is much more animated than in the others I've heard (i.e. Prey, Bridge to Terabithia, Disobedience, Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz). For the first time, I found myself absorbed in the story instead of listening to him read the story. And really, what higher praise is there for an audio book? AudioFile called his performance "masterful" when it gave the book an award.
Best voice: The master of Walter's ballet school: a deep, dry Oxbridge accent that's so well-defined you can tell that the man is stiff but RSL finds him funny and intends that we do too. The man appears in two scenes; the first, when he announces in a small monologue an opportunity for Walter to dance the role of the Prince in a nowheresville production of The Nutcracker, is hilarious; the second, in circumstances I won't reveal, is just horrible (in a story-context kind of way, not in an accent-talent kind of way).
Best moment: The scene where Walter and Mitch toss paint-filled balloons onto Walter's neighbor's carport roof, tumble together on the cold ground in their giddiness, and kiss for the first time. It's lyrically written and read with smooth, sincere intensity. All the boy- and man-sex/-groping/-kissing scenes (and there were a few) and cross-dressing and Walter's declarations of love for other males were delicious to hear RSL read, but this was, though short, the best overall.
In sum: A slasher's dream on top of a good story. Biggest complaint is that it's too short. Highly recommended.
The audio book cover said this was abridged. As the four cassettes passed all too quickly, I kept wishing Disobedience had been abridged instead of this one. Here's the funny thing: turns out Disobedience was abridged. Good God. I can only imagine what passages describing the affair in even greater detail were left out-unless the editors chopped the Henry-centric stuff and left Liza38's in, thinking they were doing us a favor. I don't want to read it and find out. But I may one day check out the paperback version of The Short History of a Prince to see if it contains any more treats.
ETA: Anyone have access to Project MUSE? This looks interesting.
Disobedience (Jane Hamilton, rec. 2000)
The story: This was a strange, frustrating, sometimes boring and sometimes intensely uncomfortable book. Narrator Henry Shaw, 17, son of pianist Elizabeth ("Beth") and American History professor [whatever his father's name is] and sister of tomboy/pre-teen Civil War reenactor Elvira (who goes by "Elvernon" on the field), has virtually no identity outside his relations with his family, which is why I've listed them first. Henry is obsessed with his mother, whom he often calls "Liza38" after the screen name he created for her when he set up the family's computer network. Related many years after the fact, most of the book focuses on Liza38's year-long affair with a Wisconsonian violin-maker (the Shaws live in Chicago, having moved from rural Vermont, which Henry misses terribly) as witnessed through a torrent of passionate emails they write to each other that Henry reads and archives without her knowledge-as the Shaw IT professional, he knows her password. Liza38 this, Richard Polloco that, Beth and Richard blah, blah, blah, interspersed with tales of Elvira/Elvernon's escapades at reenactments, his mother's regular book club meetings, and his own struggle to come to terms with his mother's secret.
We hardly hear anything about Henry that doesn't have to do with Henry-seeing-his-mother or Henry-thinking-about-his-mother or Henry-watching-his-parents-interact or Henry-observing-his-sister's-quirkiness, etc. The scenes we do get of Henry on his own, or with his friend, or with his long-distance girlfriend, are almost exclusively the best in the book. (Other highlights include some of Henry's rejoinders when he channels his anger into sarcasm and brute honesty, and his increasingly absurd interactions with members of the book club.) But even those are overshadowed by The Affair; in bed with his girlfriend, to cite the most disturbing example, he imagines in vivid detail the violin-maker stroking between his mother's legs and whispering endearments.
The questions I asked myself again and again as the tapes droned on were, Why are we listening to a book about a woman's affair when the narrator is her son? and Why not have a book about an affair narrated by one of the people having the affair, or a book about a kid where his mother's affair features but doesn't overpower his own story? The best answers I could come up with before the end were that (a) it's simply a case of a growing young man becoming aware of his parents' and his own sexuality, albeit in an odd, obsessive way; and (b) if Beth had been the narrator, we wouldn't have seen her affair's effect on her family because she didn't see it herself.
Then with the last lines of the book came, if not an explanation, at least an acknowledgment by the author of this awkward focus. After saying that he could have chosen to tell this story from a different viewpoint-say, his cuckolded father's-Henry closes the book with the lines, "But the only story I want to tell-the only one I seem to have in me-is this one. It is always about her." Beth Shaw dominated her son's life, whether she meant to or not, and so she dominates his book. It may not have been enjoyable, but it sort of makes sense.
RSL's reading: For at least the first half of the book, RSL read in a voice that, if I liked him less, I might call flat. He perked up somewhere in the second half, though, as Henry began to rebel, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that his earlier monotone was intended to reflect the character's teenage apathy.
Best moment: An exchange between Henry and an inebriated book clubber who fawned over his "perfectly amiable" self. During this short speech, which ended with, "It's like Jane Austen. I love it. I love it!", RSL sounded like Kevin Spacey-as-Lester Burnham being silly in American Beauty ("For you, Brad? I've got five!").
* * *
I'd never read anything else by Jane Hamilton, so it was hard to tell whether I disliked her writing or just this particular novel. Since RSL did another audio book of hers, The Short History of a Prince, I borrowed that one from the library next to find out. An excellent, excellent decision.
The Short History of a Prince (Jane Hamilton, rec. 1998)
This book. So enjoyable.
This time our narrator (third person limited POV) is the sensitive and sympathetic Walter McCloud.* Told in alternating sections taking place twentyish years apart, the story relates the events of two seminal years in Walter's life: 1972/3 when he is fifteen years old and living in Oak Ridge, Illinois, attending ballet classes, in love with his friend Mitch, and watching his brother die of Hodgkin's disease; and 1995/6 ("the present") when he's 38, teaching English for the first time at a small high school in Otten, WI, longing for a man he'd fallen for in New York and inadvertently alienated, and waiting to find out what will become of the McCloud family home that he loves deeply when his aunt announces that she wants to sell off her shares.
* Was it a common Midwestern practice in the '60s and '70s to give babies names like Henry and Walter, or is it just a Hamilton quirk to saddle her protagonists with names that are too old for them?
Again, our young hero defines himself in part through his family-his mother, Joyce (whom he, like Henry, oddly refers to by first name), father, Robert, and brother, Daniel-but he also nurtures close relationships with dance-school friends Susan and Mitch, and most strongly identifies himself through his love for ballet and his homosexuality, so we are dealing with a fairly independent, self-aware young man. The eccentric older women exerting influences on the narrator's life are here, too, in the form of aunt Sue Rawson, who introduces Walter to ballet when he's nine and mentors him in music and performance appreciation throughout his childhood and adolescence, and his mother, who's thankfully more removed, tolerant and well-adjusted than Liza38. But for all that they are integral to Walter's own story, they never come close to eclipsing it.
The passage that alerted me to the fact that this book would soar above Disobedience came in the first chapter, in a scene in which the younger Walter describes his thoughts on ballet and gender identity while watching Susan dance in his living room:Going to the ballet had always inspired conflicting emotions in him. He wanted, often in quick succession, to be the girl, wanted to be the girl with the boy, wanted to love the boy, wanted to be the boy, wanted again to be the girl. It was a confusion of endless change and pairing.
It's a sentiment Walter revisits when he watches Susan together with her then-boyfriend Mitch, imagining himself in her place, and when he dons a Swan Lake tutu to see what it's like to dance the woman's part.
The conflicts aren't quite what you might expect given the subject matter. Walter knows he's gay from the beginning of the story, so there's no sexual identity crisis (though there is a touch of homophobia from others); he knows he's in love with Mitch, though Mitch makes fun of him for being gay, so there's no struggle to come to terms with his feelings, only a longing for Mitch to reciprocate; he knows he isn't great at ballet and that it won't take him very far despite his passion for dance and music, so the question is only how long it will take for him to give up and whether he'll have any triumphant moments along the way; and he knows his brother is dying, so there's no suspense as to whether Daniel will recover or succumb to his illness, only the wait for the inevitable.
This isn't a bad thing. It works well. It's about Walter, his relationships and his internal life. The story's structure supports dramatic tension most of all; having seen what's going on in the present, we know that certain things will happen in the past before they're explicitly revealed. We know that something happened between Walter and Mitch that year, so we wait to find out what; we know that Daniel died, so we wait to see how his final months went; we know that Mitch dropped out of ballet training in spite of a full scholarship to an excellent school, so we wait to find out why; etc.
Before I give any more away, let me say that this is a well-paced, well-written story with a likeable main character, believable emotions and just enough plot to be interesting without tipping into melodrama.
RSL's reading: RSL sounded so much younger in this recording than he did in Disobedience that I wanted to call him "Little RSL"; then I saw that it was done only two years before the other, which is puzzling. Maybe it was the sound balance. Maybe this was one of the first audio books he performed, because his voice is much more animated than in the others I've heard (i.e. Prey, Bridge to Terabithia, Disobedience, Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz). For the first time, I found myself absorbed in the story instead of listening to him read the story. And really, what higher praise is there for an audio book? AudioFile called his performance "masterful" when it gave the book an award.
Best voice: The master of Walter's ballet school: a deep, dry Oxbridge accent that's so well-defined you can tell that the man is stiff but RSL finds him funny and intends that we do too. The man appears in two scenes; the first, when he announces in a small monologue an opportunity for Walter to dance the role of the Prince in a nowheresville production of The Nutcracker, is hilarious; the second, in circumstances I won't reveal, is just horrible (in a story-context kind of way, not in an accent-talent kind of way).
Best moment: The scene where Walter and Mitch toss paint-filled balloons onto Walter's neighbor's carport roof, tumble together on the cold ground in their giddiness, and kiss for the first time. It's lyrically written and read with smooth, sincere intensity. All the boy- and man-sex/-groping/-kissing scenes (and there were a few) and cross-dressing and Walter's declarations of love for other males were delicious to hear RSL read, but this was, though short, the best overall.
In sum: A slasher's dream on top of a good story. Biggest complaint is that it's too short. Highly recommended.
The audio book cover said this was abridged. As the four cassettes passed all too quickly, I kept wishing Disobedience had been abridged instead of this one. Here's the funny thing: turns out Disobedience was abridged. Good God. I can only imagine what passages describing the affair in even greater detail were left out-unless the editors chopped the Henry-centric stuff and left Liza38's in, thinking they were doing us a favor. I don't want to read it and find out. But I may one day check out the paperback version of The Short History of a Prince to see if it contains any more treats.
ETA: Anyone have access to Project MUSE? This looks interesting.