The Night Listener

By: Armistead Maupin

Narrated by: Armistead Maupin

Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Few storytellers in America write with such unerring insight and honesty as Armistead Maupin. Now he has given us his most ambitious and daringly imaginative work, The Night Listener, a novel as spoken-word serial, including an original music score.

Gabriel Noone is a fabulist, a writer whose late-night radio tales have brought him into the homes of millions. In the midst of a painful, unwanted separation from his longtime love, Gabriel reads the extraordinary memoir of Pete Lomax, an ailing 13-year-old boy who suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his parents. Pete is not only a gifted diarist but also a devoted listener of Gabriel's show. And thus begins an extraordinary phone friendship.

Then, out of the blue, troubling new questions arise, exploding Gabriel's comfortable assumptions and causing his ordered existence to spin wildly out of control. As he walks a vertiginous line between truth and illusion, he is finally forced to confront all his relationships - familial, romantic, and erotic.

This unprecedented audio project is as thought-provoking as it is mesmeric. The Night Listener is a meditation on the power of voices and the faith we place in them, and an extraordinary audio experience from an American literary icon.

©2000 Literary Bent LLC (P)2000 HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Critic reviews

"Filled with twists and turns that rival The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, Maupin's new novel is a deceptively simple page-turner perfectly suited for the audio format....Not only is it a book that listeners will want to discuss with friends, but once finished and all is revealed, it's likely people will want to listen to it again with a fresh ear to hear the clues that have been planted along the way....Audio is the perfect medium for this born storyteller." (Publishers Weekly)

what the ....

I wasn't sure where this book was going - was it suppposed to be a mystery or not? I kept thinking that the characters should've slapped the author for constantly drifting off on ever increasing tangents. And the ending? I like a little resolution in my stories. Thumbs down.

A Rare Turnoff

I'm a real "finish what I start" person, but I have to concede defeat in this case. Although straight, I'm not a homophobe. I have numberous gay & lesbian friends and clients, but neither they nor I flaunt our preferences with "in-your-face" descriptions of our intimate activities...and we know each other.

The story premise is interersting, maybe even compelling, but the crassness of the narrative really turned me off.

Be prepared! Better yet, find another listen.

A weak setup.

The main character in the book, Gabe, unintentionally comes across as a total and complete rube. Which is unfortunate because the character of Gabe is so clearly based on the life and experiences of Amistead Maupin himself. I can't even imagine how Amistead could read this book aloud and not wonder at his own idiocy acted out through this character.

The story itself is a good idea, and starts out with great promise before the main character's stupidity is injected. (Now what I'm about to write may sound juvenile, but it's an accurate summary of the story.) At this point there are four unneeded hours of the main character acting out embarassing stupidity. Then somebody else comes along and says "hey! wow! you're stupid!" or something along those lines and the main character spends two audio-book hour in denial that he is stupid. Then the main character decides to run out to prove to himself that he is indeed stupid. Mission accomplished.

I have to say I regret purchasing this as an audiobook. I'm sure as a standard text version it's far more bearable though. I would like to comment on some of the other reviewers who claimed this novel is full of graphic gay sex. It is not. There are some mentions of gay sex, but none of it drags on more than a few seconds and deals more with the main character's discomfort with growing old as a man involved in a gay culture which is heavily focused on sex. None of the sex is any more steamy then something you'd find in a standard heterosexual fiction.

Graphic

This book started out with quite a bit of promise...It's not a bad listen if you are not offended by graphic discriptions of very gratuitous gay sex.

By the end you wish the protagonist would just quite crying all the time and get a life...