Armchair Audies 2014: Literary Fiction

I'm such a cheater. I committed to judging 3 categories in the Armchair Audies project this year, and judge I will. But this category (LitFic) I'm judging with a bit of an asterisk, given that I didn't actually listen to all of the nominees. But! The discerning Jennifer at Literate Housewife also listened to almost all of them, and we've chatted about them and decided on a winner.

Here are the Audies Literary Fiction nominees:

So - the two I didn't touch were Eleanor Morse's White Dog Fell from the Sky and Stephen Kiernan's The Curiosity (neither of which Jennifer enjoyed enough to want to talk me into listening to them as serious contenders.)

Given that I can't argue otherwise, I suppose that I have to put Meryl Streep's reading of Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary in 4th place. I haven't mentioned it here before, but that's because thinking about it puts me to sleep; listening to it was a struggle to drive safely. I adore Streep as much as the next gal, but this was a dull dull audio, and felt way longer than the three CDs it took to hear.

Of the other three, I enjoyed the novel most but the audio least when it comes to Amy McFadden's reading of Jincy Willet's Amy Falls Down. The novel was funny and smart and wry but McFadden's voice was too young for the titular Amy.

Which leaves us with two Big Books of 2013 - both literally and in how they impacted the literary landscape.

My mom suggested that instead of listening to David Pittu's reading of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, I should have read it and I would have liked the Pulitzer Prize winner better. Of course, she hadn't gotten to the end of it herself when she said that. I will note that my post complaining about the novel - especially the ending - has gotten far more hits in the six months since I put it up than anything else in the history of this blog. And I've had tons of conversations on various sites regarding similar complaints. So. It's not just me, is what I'm saying. And Pittu does do a fine job with the material. He portrays the characters consistently and with energy (perhaps more energy than they earn in the text), although he give Boris a semi-Slavic accent that Tartt intended to be semi-Australian instead.

But the multi-cast (Will Patton, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Shepherd, and Clifton Collins, Jr.) reading of Philipp Meyer's The Son was definitely the best audio of this bunch. Although I also had some quibbles with this book, they were a lot more personal than universal. And the audio cast did a lot to keep me engaged with the text even when I was irritable about it. They were true to their characters, fluid, and indefatigable across the long length of the novel. It was a notably good listen, and well worth the nod among this particular batch of nominees. The Armchair Audies vote goes to The Son.

Amy Falls Down

Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willet
(Thomas Dunne / Brilliance Audio, 2013)
Format: audio download via library (narrated by Amy McFadden)

From Goodreads: 'Amy Gallup is an aging novelist and writing instructor living in Escondido, California, with her dog, Alphonse. Since recent unsettling events, she has made some progress. While she still has writer's block, she doesn't suffer from it. She's still a hermit, but she has allowed some of her class members into her life. She is no longer numb, angry, and sardonic: she is merely numb and bemused, which is as close to happy as she plans to get. Amy is calm.

So, when on New Year's morning she shuffles out to her backyard garden to plant a Norfolk pine, she is wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Amy falls down.

A simple accident, as a result of which something happens, and then something else, and then a number of different things, all as unpredictable as an eight-ball break. At first the changes are small, but as these small events carom off one another, Amy's life changes in ways that range from ridiculous to frightening to profound.

This most reluctant of adventurers is dragged and propelled by train, plane, and automobile through an outlandish series of antic media events on her way to becoming--to her horror--a kind of celebrity. And along the way, as the numbness begins to wear off, she comes up against something she has avoided all her life: her future, that "sleeping monster, not to be poked." '

I picked this because it's one of the titles in the Literary Fiction category of the Audies, which is one of the categories I tackled for the Armchair Audies project. Haven't read any Willet before, and definitely enjoyed this title very much. It did start slowly for me. I know it's a follow-up to a previous novel, but the former writing class (the subject of the first novel) took up too much room here. They're fun characters, but not the focus of this novel.

The focus is Amy, who is a grand introvert of a human. She's smart and acerbic and only bothers caring about whatever she wants to care about. Her phobias are right out in front, as is her insular nature and her bemusement at most of what happens from the moment the homeless woman in the ER shows her her own photograph and un-remembered words in the newspaper. Beneath it all is Amy's struggle to deal with the death of her beloved-but-platonic husband, aging, and a world that went and changed rapidly when she wasn't really looking. Her sharpness is her strength, and she is so very strong.

This would have been better as text than audio for me, I think. There were a couple of character voices that fell flat - and unfortunately they were the most frequent ones. Amy's agent was a rasping coughing screech, and while true to the page, it's the kind of thing better imagined than experienced. And Amy herself sounded far too young and engaged to fit the purportedly aging and disconnected character. Amy McFadden is a charming narrator, but not the right voice Amy Gallup.