The case for doing less.
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Afterward, Hesse noticed the name Walter Cronkite trending on Twitter.
Yet, Hesse noted, no adoring comparisons to any deceased icons had followed.
Her voice, after all, did not sound like Walter Cronkites.
The issue wasnt how she sounded.
I have thought about that column and headline many times since the fall of 2019.
I had gone online to see whether there were any decent recordings of Didions work.
I do it when a writer who has meant something to me dies.
I do it when I run across prose that makes me want to hear it beautifully read.
I do it when something Im reading on the page moves me for reasons I cant explain.
This happened to me once with a Jonathan Franzen novel.
She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
I wanted to hear what that alchemy sounded like.
He seemed to have no understanding of how writing works.
It was impossible to follow the logic, let alone be affected by Franzens meticulously calibrated prose.
In Didions case, the situation on Audible wasnt pretty.
She had no concept of deadpan and seemed to think it her mandate to bring Didions prose to life.
Keaton isnt the first talented actress to make a hash of reading literary prose aloud.
In 1965, Julie Harris recordedStuart Little,and from then on E.B.
White saw to it that he himself recorded his own fiction.
Its easy to hear why.
Part of it is that tone of wide-eyed astonishment you hear, with all of its phony inflections.
Part of it is the way Harris is always pulling focus to the wrong words.
And part of it is just her unwillingness to read the thing straight.
The words get swallowed up in her acting so that all you hear is whats happening in the plot.
The way the story is told just disappears.
Whites writing becomes wholly unlike itself becomes, in fact, generic.
Harris is effectively editing E.B.
Thanks to her revisions, he becomes a ghostwriter of his own work.
White is writing about strange or absurd things as though they were perfectly ordinary.
A handful of things Keaton and Harris can be heard doing are not uncommon among American audiobook readers.
Varying ones pace on arbitrary words or phrases just to be interesting is something you run across.
So is emphasizing random words and syllables.
Then theres the idea that one should venture to act out the meanings of words.
If the wordlanguidappears, you read it slowly, for example.
You read a word that denotes hostility in a way that sounds angry.
It would be easy to attribute a discomfort with deadpan to American ideas about acting.
Deadpan is about suppression; serious American acting has traditionally been about letting it all hang out.
And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles?
Were the Boy Scouts OK politically?
Was bulgur really necessary?
Where to recycle batteries?
How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood?
… How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be?
(Harris is essentially doing this with the whole premise ofStuart Little.
I didnt like it and said so …
The Joe Berk in question was the same Cambridge, Massachusettsbased record producer who had putStuart Littleon vinyl.
She does it beautifully and I feel greatly in her debt, and in yours for selecting her.
Its a strange letter, full of equivocation if carefully read.
To say someone has done something beautifully isnt necessarily to say they have done it well.
Reliable sounds like someone who can be counted on to be punctual.
And she never gave him any cause for worry?
What on earth does that mean?
Theres nothing in my letter to you of October 1965 that isnt true.
Julie Harris did read Stuart Little beautifully.
I did feel in her debt and in yours.
You tend to throw the job to someone in the theater Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris …
They dramatize a book …
I think a book is better read the way my father used to read books to me without drama.
And thiswashis milieu, the world of publishing and books and words.
Five years later, placed in the same embarrassing, no-win situation, he put his foot down.
In both cases, the recording had already been made.
Im not sure thats accurate.
I think he always felt the way he felt.
Maybe by 1970 White just had no more fucks to give.
Berk was no mountebank or philistine.
Its moving without being manipulative.
I believe that to be true.
