The Story of Forgetting

Patrick Lawlor reads the precocious Block’s first novel with two markedly different voices for its two protagonists. The hunchbacked, memory-obsessed Abel Haggard is given a broad Southern accent that remains remarkably precise, considering its exaggerated pitch, and Seth Waller, the teenager trapped in an unhappy family, in search of an explanation for his mother’s mysterious illness, receives a much flatter, less remarkable, even reading. Lawlor’s technique swiftly and easily divides the book’s two halves, but his Abel rapidly grows painful to listen to as he is too exaggerated to be much more than a stereotype. Sounding neither convincing nor mellifluous, Lawlor’s Abel holds back this otherwise solid audiobook. A Random House hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 4). (July)