A Real Tape Turner

By Richard Zoglin

The hotshot columnist-author played by Nick Nolte in the summer comedy I Love Trouble runs into a lawyer friend, played by Saul Rubinek. "I'm dying to read your book, man," says the lawyer. "When is it coming out on tape?" It is hardly a surprise that Rubinek's character turns out to be the movie's chief sleazebag. What kind of shallow, no-time-for-anything '90s philistine confuses listening to books with actually reading them?

A lot of people, as it happens. Books on tape are steadily encroaching on those old-fashioned cloth- and paperbound items that used to be the main purveyors of literature in our culture. Most of the credit -- or blame -- goes to a pair of ubiquitous electronic devices: the Walkman and the car cassette player. Just as they have increased sales of music cassettes, they have made audio-tapes practical: now you can "read" while you're on the rowing machine or making that long drive to the beach.

Your choices range from self-help books to celebrity biographies, from John Grisham thrillers to the works of Dickens and Shakespeare, most narrated by well-known actors (Sam Waterston, Whoopi Goldberg, Glenda Jackson, Michael York) and compressed into easy-listening chunks of three or four hours -- "because," as one audio publisher's blurb puts it, "books are long and life is short."

Retail sales for audio books (which typically cost around $17 for a two- cassette package) reached $1.2 billion in 1993, up 40% from the year before. Titles and celebrity readers are proliferating. Sharon Stone has just been signed to narrate The Scarlet Letter. Gone With the Wind is about to be released on tape for the first time, unabridged on 30 cassettes. "Nine years ago, only 8% of the population had heard a book on tape; now it's close to 25%," says Michael Viner, co-founder of Dove Audio, a nine-year-old Los Angeles company that helped pioneer the field.

Bidding wars for the audio rights to potential best sellers are becoming nearly as heated as those waged over movie rights. Tom Clancy's newest novel, Debt of Honor, was picked up by Random House Audio for a record sum -- reportedly $1 million. Though sales of a typical book on tape still represent only a fraction of the hardcover sales (usually 10% or less), the numbers are climbing. The Bridges of Madison County, read by author Robert James Waller, sold 163,000 audio copies. Some 250,000 tapes of John Grisham's latest novel, The Chamber, have been shipped to bookstores thus far. And Rush Limbaugh has sold 300,000 tapes of The Way Things Ought to Be -- not bad for a $17 version of his daily radio show.

On the retail front, the racks of audio books that have sprouted in bookshops are appearing in video and record stores as well. "The biggest problem we faced in growing this business was a lack of consumer awareness," says Jenny Frost, vice president and publisher of Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio. "Now people are finding them in retail outlets, trying them and discovering they think they are great." Inevitably, specialty stores have begun to crop up. Houston's BookTronics is one of the largest to carry nothing but audio -- with 8,000 titles for sale and rent. "We call ourselves the bookstore of the future," says co-owner Alan Livingston.

And what sort of future is it? Literary purists wince at the prospect of tapes undermining the printed page. Yet listening to a book is not an experience to be sneered at. Storytelling began as an oral art, after all, and there can be something profoundly satisfying about hearing a book read aloud. In some ways an audio book demands more concentration than a printed one. Reading allows freedom -- the freedom to proceed at one's own pace, to stop and savor a passage, to pause and reread or jump ahead and skim. With an audio book, the pace is steady and unyielding; if a moment's distraction causes you to miss a key passage, you can return to the exact place only with difficulty.

The greatest drawback to audio books, of course, is that they are usually heavily abridged. (Unabridged versions are available for many books, both in stores and through mail order, but they represent a relatively small segment of the market.) Most mass-market audio books are boiled down to a length of three to six hours. Even at a relatively brisk reading pace of a minute-and-a- half per page, that typically means more than half the author's prose is left on the cutting-room floor. Rather than tamper with the author's language, editors make an effort to select passages so that the narrative remains clear.

This plot-centered approach can hurt the novel in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The Alienist, Caleb Carr's best seller about a serial killer on the loose in 1890s New York City (read by Edward Herrmann), makes an engrossing 4 1/2-hour tape. What is left out, however, is a good deal of the historical atmosphere, as well as many details of the laborious murder investigation. As a result, catching this serial killer seems as easy as a jog around Central Park.

Nonfiction books generally fare better. Listening to a celebrity read his or her own autobiography -- Kirk Douglas' The Ragman's Son, say -- is little different from sitting through a long, entertaining talk-show appearance. David McCullough's 1,117-page Truman is necessarily truncated in its six-hour audio adaptation. But as narrated by McCullough (who performed the same service for TV's The Civil War), it is a pleasure.

Most narrators are well chosen, easy on the ear and fully engaged in their work. Sometimes too engaged. The problem with moonlighting actors is that they can't help, well, acting. In reading Disclosure, Michael Crichton's best seller about a man who sues his female boss for sex harassment, John Lithgow hams it up with overripe accents -- the protagonist's Hispanic lawyer seems to come from somewhere outside Transylvania. But on the other hand, Brad Pitt delivers Cormac McCarthy's hardscrabble prose in The Crossing with a twangy stoicism that perfectly reflects the novel's tone.

Authors who read their own work are generally less polished but often more effective than actors. Winston Groom reads his novel Forrest Gump in a husky Alabama drawl, delivering a lot more salt and a lot less sappiness than there is in the current hit movie. Hearing Stephen King read the beautifully modulated opening chapter of Needful Things is almost enough to convince you to stick around for the rest of the 24-hour tape. Almost but not quite: one odd aspect of the audio-book market is that King, perhaps the contemporary author who could most benefit from trimming, is the one whose books are never abridged.

With a few exceptions, authors are usually not involved in the cutting of their work for audio. "It would have been too painful," says McCullough of participating in shortening Truman. David Halberstam, who has had several books adapted for tape (among them The Summer of Forty-Nine and The Fifties) claims he has never listened to any of them. "I presume that the people doing the cutting are very good," he says. "But I don't want to hear what they have done."

Thomas Keneally, in contrast, happily picked up the tape of his book Schindler's List and was pleased with the four-hour adaptation read by Ben Kingsley. "The text is not an amputee," he says. "I felt that it represented the essence of the thing very well." After refusing to allow audio condensations of his previous novels, E.L. Doctorow permitted his latest, The Waterworks, to be cut to four audio hours. "I have changed my position on this," he says. "It is pretty clear to me that print culture is under enormous assault today. I take the position now that anything that offers language and the sound of words and literate thought is a good thing."

Doctorow's dilemma reflects the conflict between purists and realists. Will the popularity of books on tape further erode the interest in reading? Or should we welcome any new literary medium -- even a slightly degraded one like books on tape? One hopeful sign is that despite the boom in audio books, sales of hardcovers and paperbacks have not fallen. Just as Hollywood once feared the advent of videocassettes but later discovered they fed rather than discouraged interest in movies, books on tape may actually promote the cause of literature. Four hours of Doctorow or McCarthy is better than nothing, especially when the alternative is to stare at the the brake lights ahead of you.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles