Audio Books: How Bad Does It Have to Be Before You Hit Eject?

I’ve been thinking about audio books versus the paper versions. I just finished listening to a book I never would have finished if I’d been reading it. Reading a book requires me to pick it up time and again or continue reading through distractions, while listening to a book in my car simply obliges me to resist hitting a button to change to a radio station.

I actually had decided to quit listening to this particular book—a mystery thriller—but then forgot to get something else when I drove up to the lake house to meet the electrician the other day. So I ended up finishing it after all. Not entirely a waste of time, since one can learn much from a poorly executed book.

This book was interesting because the writer did some things very, very well, even though she did other things so badly. I wonder if the things that irritated me—the unrealistic characters, the self-obsessed heroine—would have irritated other readers. The heroine was supposed to have been a rebellious little rich girl wild child who became a cop. I had a really hard time swallowing that. (FBI agent, maybe; but a common cop?) Worse, she was a narcotics agent. The wild children I knew in my misspent youth hated all cops, but reserved a particular contempt for “narcs.” So that aspect of the book kept yanking my “I don’t believe this” response, which kept pulling me out of the story. Worse, the devices that were intended to make me sympathetic to the heroine kept irritating me—it reached the point that I was groaning every time she started contemplating suicide and staring at herself naked in front of a mirror.

Most of the other characters in the book were not so much characters as caricatures. The over-tanned Florida Jew with the New York accent and the cigarette hanging out of her mouth, the oily European who kept talking about “stupid Americans,” the “overfed” teenager—in fact, I was about halfway through the book when I realized that the only characters the writer had respect for were the heroine and one little girl. Even the two dogs and the cat in the story were portrayed as obnoxious. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

The author of this disaster has been hitting the New York Times bestseller lists for a good ten years now, yet she still sprinkles her book with dozens and dozens of clichés: heavy as lead, spinning like a top, bright as a new penny. I kept wondering what happened to her editor’s red pencil. But by far the most serious flaw was the story’s complete lack of surprise. No plot twists, nothing unexpected until the final twist at the end, which was indeed a twist but failed by being unbelievable.

All of which has made me think a lot about the importance of respecting my characters, and maintaining surprise and freshness in my stories. Always useful reminders. But the next book I listen to is going to be something well done, that I can enjoy.