FBR 106: Voice and the Reading Experience . . .

Now, I have not read nearly widely enough across the author spectrum or deeply enough in the writers I do like, but it struck me today, as it must have struck everyone else long ago, that there are writers whose novels and stories, no matter how different the tone, no matter who their narrators are, come from the same place, off the same typewriter, the same desk — while the "identity" of other writers is far more distant from the reader.

In other words, no matter what you read by certain writers, it is the writer who you are hearing. This is to say that the writer has not submerged himself or herself into the character of another. Think of Faulkner. You can pick up nearly everything from Sanctuary to The Reivers, and across the stories, and Faulkner is speaking to you. He and his voice combine to create a presence in each story. Whether it's narrated by Quentin Compson or Bayard Sartoris, if you have listened to the audios of him reading, you hear that voice: swift, monotonic, friendly.

Capote is the same way. Even in his creepy early stories — "Miriam," for example, or "A Tree of Night" — but also in novels as different as The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, we are on Truman's porch, listening to him read. Richard Yates is another whose novels and stories come from a pen attached to only his hand.

There are other writers, however, whose voices shift from story to story. For some reason, I read a couple of Grace Paley's stories lately, and frankly the differing voices point me toward different sources, almost schizophrenically, and the effect is off-putting. Certainly, I haven't read nearly enough of her, a handful of pages, but there is a frostiness about who Grace really is that I'm not sure I like (or, rather, I like so very much more its opposite, the warm voice of a friend), and it's probably because there seems to me a screen or construct of "other" in front of her voices.

Tobias Wolff appears to me another of these sorts of writers, though I will instantly bow before a wide reader of his stuff who dissents. In some of Wolff's stories, his persona, his self, is not immediately clear to me. James Salter is another. Beautiful, though I find myself listening to the stories from Row L, not from the next club chair.

Joyce, no. He is of the first camp. Carson McCullers also in the first camp (if you put to the side the oddly composed Reflections in an Golden Eye).

Philip Roth? Well, even the Zuckerman books are in his voice, so, yes, he's definitely in the first group. Updike, also. He professed that he didn't use his biography in the stories. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant here: the voice and diction and sound of his many works are his and no one else's.

Flannery O'Connor is in the first group. Out of each of her stories and novels, as different as they are, comes a voice with the lilt and tone and humor of only her, as if she's telling what happened while you follow her around the yard feeding peacocks. Toni Morrison seems to be like her and the others in this feeling that no matter if her books have vastly different narrators, they're all born and issue from the one mind.

I could be so very wrong about this, however, and don't want to go on record any more permanent than this; it's just a little something that occurred to me as a way of defining a very personal reading experience.