Can We Please Put an End to Overperformed Audiobooks?

Britney Spears is perfect and her nasal voice with a Southern accent and just the right touch of vocal fry is perfect. Which is why I was so surprised to hear Michelle Williams, an actress who is also perfect, read the audio version of Britney’s memoir with a bit of a drawl but mostly very proper English. Each “what” had its own introductory “hhh” sound: “h-what.”

Between the way the memoir was Frankinsteined together by a disparate group of ghostwriters and the way Williams delivered the narration, it felt like she was doing some fascinating character who’s had a really tough life and bad taste in men but really wasn’t Britney in any recognizable way (her Justin Timberlake impression is memorable, though).

I chose Michelle Williams as my primary example of an actor whose eccentric narration distracts from the action of a book mostly because most regular narrators don’t make a ton of money, they often don’t have a lot of direction, and they are often crunched for time in the recording studio. I’m not trying to pick on any one of them. Or on any particular editor or producer, who is also likely overworked and underpaid. Michelle Williams can handle my criticism and get out entirely unscathed. So can Ronan Farrow, who did a cringe-inducing Tough Ukrainian Guy accent, among others, for the reading of the audiobook version of his 2019 work of nonfiction, Catch and Kill.

As I’ve become more of an audiobook listener over the years and come to appreciate narration as its own art form, I’ve begun to notice something important: it is very enjoyable when a narrator reads the words on a page to me, but not nearly as enjoyable when they over-interpret. The ideal narrator is someone who enhances the experience of listening to a book and getting lost in it rather than pulling attention away from it.

To put it more simply, please just read me a story without distraction. I don’t need to hear a variety of voices from a single narrator if a full-cast production is not in the cards. Not every novel needs to be read as a radio drama. And please go light on the accents. Accents, especially ones done by a single narrator that are meant to distinguish between a variety of ethnicities and identities, feel as out of date as skinny jeans in the year 2024.

I’m not naming names, but over the past few years I’ve listened to many a male narrator do a preposterously high-pitched lady voice, as if all women speak like chipmunks. I’ve also encountered the reverse, when female narrators attempt to be masculine by lowering their voices, as if every male character were James Earl Jones. It’s gender essentialism at its dumbest.

I’ve also heard too many narrators do painfully on the nose accents for characters of different ethnic backgrounds that devolve into caricature. It is so lovely when a book features a multinational cast of characters, but so cringy when performed by one actor who attempts to voice them all. I thought we were past this as a culture after Hari Kondablu released his incisive critique of The Simpsons’ depiction of Apu, the clerk with the thick Indian accent voiced by Hank Azaria. It’s wonderful when producers cast, for instance, a native-Japanese speaker to read a book that’s set in Tokyo, but less wonderful when that particular narrator tries to then do a Southern American accent.

I blame Jim Dale, the master voice actor who famously did voices for hundreds of different characters in the seven books in the Harry Potter series and made each one distinct.

But not every book needs to be read like Harry Potter, a series primarily meant for children, an audience that might benefit from hearing less nuanced, very broad characters.

This is not to say that narrators can never depict characters from different cultural backgrounds than their own, much as I would never say that authors cannot write characters outside of their own ethnicities. However, both cases require great care, the kind that likely isn’t available in the production of the average audiobook.

Even as audiobooks claim a larger and larger percentage of the overall book market, the resources that publishers put into their production seem to have leveled off. And by resources I don’t mean special sound effects or music. We don’t need to hear doors slam! I’m talking more about direction, working with narrators on their performances to make the best (and least intrusive) version of the book possible.

I’m also talking about catching mispronunciations of words that are central to the plot of the book abound, even in place and people names (I’m thinking about a book set in Manhattan in which Houston Street is pronounced like the city in Texas rather than NYC pronunciation: HOW-ston).

Audiobook publishers have absolutely gotten better at casting overall, and I’d be negligent not to mention so much good work being done. Recent favorites include the always delightful Mara Wilson reading Temim Fruchter’s lovely debut novel City of Laughter, January Lavoy’s utterly engaging reading of Kelly Link’s epic masterpiece The Book of Love, and Dion Graham’s reading of the two published titles in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy.

With the rise of some much needed competition for Audible (Spotify has entered the race, but the indie upstart Libro.fm is by far the best of them, for writers and for listeners and for bookstores) producing a dashed-off audio version of a book no longer cuts it. When we listen to audiobooks we might spend days with these voices in our heads. They, and we, deserve more care, which doesn’t necessarily mean more bells and whistles.