Telephone

A Novel

By: Percival Everett

Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.

After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter's slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he's ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

©2020 Percival Everett (P)2023 Tantor

Robot narrator??

The story had merit, but the narration was AWFUL. It does list a person by name, but I cannot be convinced that this isn't an AI generated voice. There's no inflection, emotion, nothing. It's just like those AI narrated YouTube videos that the kids watch. I had to quit. I wasn't getting anything out of it. I couldn't listen to the story narrated that way. I will have to read this one the old-fashioned way, I guess.

NE Version

I tore this. I agree that the reader was stilted in his reading, but the story is excellent, thought provoking. Life. Our interactions. How we navigate. What gives us purpose. Surviving. I’m still pricey.

Weird and not enjoyable

This book is somewhat engrossing but ends abruptly. I guess the reader is to fill out the ending for themselves. The narrator sounds like he is AI generated and was a complete distraction. Do yourself a favor and take a pass on this book

Good not great

he tried to do too much. it's at least two stories that never intersect. Titles of chapters are intetesting, but baffli g to folks who aren't paleontogists.Having read Erasure and James, I was bit disappointed. Enjoyed the locales. I" m familar with Pasadena and New Mexico.

A serious book that is amazing.

The breadth of knowledge that Everett has about geology and chess is displayed in this book. Guy wrenching story. Like other of his books there is dual story lines that intersect.

find something else to read

terrible narration. very flat. probably a computer. this version of the book ended poorly. I'm fine with cliff hangers or leaving the reader with thought provoking questions. but this just cut off in the middle of the last chapter. It would be like writing a review and ..........

This is one convoluted storyline with dragging narration.

The plot is ridiculous, characters are not plausible, the main character sort of bumbles along from one poor decision to another.

His decision to rescue exploited women, enlist the help of Mexican authorities while his family is suffering is outrageously contrived. He is a college professor—he would know that turning the case over to the FBI would have been the only way to handle the problem. He would also know how to use Google maps. And the poor decisions just go on…. He seems to ping pong from one bad decision to another, one location to another. The rambling just doesn’t add up to much. If the author wanted to focus on the plight of the missing women there would have been lots of opportunity for rich storytelling. But it is just another dribble of a storyline with a crazy flat end ending.

To compound problem for the audio version of this book, the narrator’s timing is bad. The main character’s musings could be engaging and humorous, but the dead pan, halting delivery takes the steam out of any delivery.