AUDIOBOOKS

AUDIOBOOKS | Connie Ogle

Confronting Loss

Allegory, gritty realism, arch humor: These audiobooks tackle the subject of loss in different yet equally powerful ways.

If you harbor reservations about listening to a literary novel, the terrific production of Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers (Random House Audio, 4 hours and 6 minutes) should quell your fears. It will also break your heart. Narrated with incredible range by Traci Kato-Kiriyama, who captures every nuance of the changing narrative voice, The Swimmers uses a public pool as an allegory for life, a universal stage to highlight deeply personal loss. In the first segment, for which Kato-Kiriyama employs a satirical tone, swimmers visit an underground community pool to escape aboveground problems. They follow the rules and the painted black line with equal attention. But when a crack develops and the pool is closed for good, everything changes, especially for Alice, whose laps kept her dementia at bay. A cold, officious, second-person voice replaces the genial collective “we,” detailing the limitations of Alice’s new existence with callous precision. In the final section, the point of view shifts again, as we view Alice’s decline through the eyes of her daughter. Kato-Kiriyama’s subtle vocal fluctuations and tones resonate, particularly the rueful observation of one elderly swimmer who could be any of us: “It all went by so fast.”

Two distinct voices shine a light on separate sides of a racial chasm in Steph Cha’s tense, riveting Your House Will Pay (HarperAudio, 9 hours and 50 minutes). Inspired by a real-life shooting, the novel focuses on two Los Angeles families shattered by violence, one Black, the other Korean. In the early 1990s, Shawn Matthews’ sister, Ava, was shot and killed by a grocery store owner who thought Ava was stealing. Growing up in the wake of such tragedy unmoored young Shawn, but almost 30 years later, after a stint in prison, he has finally gotten his life together, with a job he likes and a serious girlfriend far from his old neighborhood. Grace Park, on the other hand, has lived a more sheltered existence, working in the Korean pharmacy owned by her parents. When her mother is shot in a drive-by, Grace is forced to confront ugly secrets and her own prejudices. Glenn Davis and Greta Jung share narrating duties as Shawn and Grace. Davis enhances Cha’s moving portrait of Shawn, a man working hard to move on from his loss, while Jung gives an empathetic reading of Grace’s careening emotions and eventual understanding of how she must end the cycle of violence. Novelists always aren’t the best readers of their own material, but Steven Rowley’s hilarious narration of his engaging comic novel The Guncle (Penguin Audio, 11 hours and 23 minutes) is a delight. Rowley is so good you can’t imagine anyone else as gay Uncle Patrick, a former sitcom star who takes in his young niece and nephew for the summer after their mother dies. But the story is deeper than you might initially think. Rowley’s arch inflection perfectly captures Patrick’s skills of deflection, which is crucial to the story: Witty banter and jokes are the armor Patrick uses to keep his own terrible loss at arm’s length. He has exiled himself to the desert, but the summer forces him to remember why opening one’s heart is always worth the trouble.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.