"Reidy smartly takes us just up to Simon's first, not wholly unalloyed, triumph, paralleled by bittersweet family moments ... An appealing portrait of one individual's struggle.
—Library Journal, Top Fall Indie Fiction
“Reidy’s portrayal of Simon’s anxieties and insecurities, both throughout his years of silence and later in his bid to be heard, is moving and honest.”
—Booklist
“The reader is brought in close to the emotional turmoil of the story ... the joy that Simon feels when he gets his first voiceover job, and the peace he feels when he realizes that a real voiceover artist is one who creates characters from scripts — who brings humanity into the recording ... [Reidy’s ] focus on character and voice draws readers in, and, in plain language, forces them to confront the communication problems present in their own families.”
—Necessary Fiction
“ ... Rich and varied ... an energetic parade of characters and voices ..."
—Kirkus Reviews
"The Voiceover Artist connects a community of disparate Chicagoans—rising stars and fading elderly, drunks and dreamers, performers and mutes—who yearn to find their voices and prove their value to the world. In a chain of intimate, first-person narratives, each character takes a turn at the microphone, confessing to the reader the secrets that separate them from the people they love. The Voiceover Artist is a compelling and unforgettable exploration of the power of the human voice and the human heart."
—Valerie Laken, author of Dream House and Separate Kingdoms
"With this voice-driven (literally) novel about a young man (literally) finding his voice, Dave Reidy moves into the front ranks of Chicago writers, Catholic writers, writers about stuttering, and writers about sibling rivalry: a list that will give you some idea of his range and literary ranginess. The Voiceover Artist is winning, smart, and generous."
—David Leavitt, two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and author, most recently, of The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (Bloomsbury)
"I often wonder what happens in a person's life to change him from a boy to a man. But brothers don't change from a brother into something else. They remain brothers. As a man, being and having a brother might start to feel claustrophobic. No way out. Dave Reidy's The Voiceover Artist examines this from every angle. This novel is brotherhood, is boyhood, is manhood. How poignant that these characters are searching for their voices while attempting to use these voices to make a living. There is family, life, raw realness to be found in their father's stutter, in their jealousy and love for each other, in every word of Reidy's book."
—Lindsay Hunter, author of the novel Ugly Girls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the story collections Don't Kiss Me (FSG Originals) and Daddy's (featherproof)
"The Voiceover Artist is tender and beguiling. It is a wonderful story, told with artful directness about family, faith, forgiveness and the large human struggle we all face to find our true voice."
—Scott Turow, author of ten best-selling works of fiction, including Presumed Innocent and Identical
"My first thought picking this book up was what if Binx Bolling [of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer] were really Catholic and winds up not glib in New Orleans but stuttering in Chicago? This is a completely errant, if not arrant, idea. The Voiceover Artist is a broad, ambitious, multifaceted, exacting set of portraits of some very twisted folk. They are their own analysts, viciously jockeying to win. Mr. Reidy can be frightening."
—Padgett Powell, Whiting Award winner and author of six novels, including You & Me (Ecco)
"Woven into the middle of this captivating story is the most accurate depiction of the Chicago improv world that I've ever read. When you open the book, you can smell the stale beer and hear the clever quips."
—Keegan-Michael Key, co-creator and co-star of the Peabody Award-winning Comedy Central series Key & Peele
2015-08-17
A Chicago-set novel about a troubled young man trying to reach his potential, aided—or hindered—by a cast of colorful characters. This book has a premise as direct and familiar as a screenwriter's log line: a young man named Simon, having recently overcome a stutter, sets out to fulfill his dream of becoming a voice-over artist. Sounds simple, but author Reidy (Captive Audience: Stories, 2009) does all he can to complicate it. Consider, first, the family dynamic: Simon's mother is dead after years of wasting her life with Simon's father, an alcoholic with his own stuttering problem. Also consider: Simon hasn't just overcome a stutter—he has emerged from 18 years without speaking. Meanwhile, Simon's brother, Connor, is building his career in improvisational comedy; he has always been verbose and witty—an obvious shadow cast over Simon's silence. Also, there are the numerous women in Simon's life: ex-girlfriends, current love interests, and his troubled talent agent. As a voice-over artist might say in a commercial: you get all this and more! With the story summarized, the novel's busyness shows. Reidy is restless, moving from narrator to narrator; nearly all the major characters get his or her own section, all in first person (except, shrewdly, for a chapter about Simon before he found his voice, narrated in third). As a result, the novel often feels like it's stopping and starting; halfway in, readers may think the main narrative hasn't even begun. But the voices and characters themselves are rich and varied—a reminder that plot, slavishly tended to, can result in stuffy prose. Here, Reidy has fun, and isn't that sometimes the raison d'être for clear, familiar premises? The more solid the outline, the more fun it is to color outside of it. Better appreciated as an energetic parade of characters and voices rather than a straightforward narrative.
