PRAISE FOR THE VOICEOVER ARTIST
“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 OF THE TWO HOTEL FRANCFORTS: A NOVEL
“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 UGLY GIRLS
“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
“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 Voiceover Artist, you can smell the stale beer and hear the clever quips.”
—Keegan-Michael Key , CO-CREATOR AND CO-STAR OF THE COMEDY CENTRAL SERIES KEY & PEELE
“Rich and varied . . . an energetic parade of characters and voices . . . ”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Moving and honest. [ . . . ] The love-hate relationship between Simon and Connor is a stirring depiction of a troubled sibling bond.”
—Booklist
THE
VOICE
OVEr
ArTIsT
dAvE
rEidy
CURBSIDE SPLENDOR
Curbside Splendor Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
The stories contained herein are works of fiction. All incidents, situations, institutions, governments, and people are fictional and any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. Any views and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the views of closerlook, inc. or its employees.
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2015.
First Edition
Copyright © 2015 by Dave Reidy
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939312
ISBN 978-1-94-043055-3
Edited by Gretchen Kalwinski
Designed by Alban Fischer
Manufactured in the United States of America.
“ . . . what true intimacy entails: supreme attunement alternating with
bewildered estrangement.”
—Judith Thurman
IN THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010
PROLOGUE
Simon Davies
BEHIND A DOOR I’d closed against a father who wasn’t home yet and the wintry draft seeping through the living room window, I sat on my bed—my childhood bed, though I was twenty-four years old by then—listening to a clock radio, waiting to hear the right word. What I heard first was the voice of Larry Sellers, a man I considered a better friend to me than my brother ever would be.
From the age of thirteen, I’d devoured Larry’s masterful renditions of the bargains to be found in my grocer’s freezer—a twenty-count box of Van de Kamp’s fish sticks on sale for three ninety-nine, or Dole Fruit and Juice bars for eighty-nine cents a piece—but his run as the voice of Jewel Foods had ended two years ago, and I hadn’t heard much of Larry on the radio since then. As he called my attention to the Winter 2007 Sales Event at Peoria’s Prairie State Chevrolet, I heard the excess weight in his jowls and detected some shortness of breath, but Larry’s voice was still a flawless instrument. I closed my eyes, immersing myself in the warmth of Larry’s sonorous performance and floating over the waves of its subtly rhythmic rising and falling.
And then Larry Sellers said the right word: “Financing.”
I wasn’t in the market for a car loan, so the tingling that climbed the back of my neck had nothing to do with zero-percent rates. The rightness of “financing” lay in its linguistics. “F” was a fricative. A fricative would do the trick.
I slid a greasy fingernail into a ridge on the volume dial and spun it toward me until it clicked. Radio off. I sat in the silence I’d made, a silence that was mine to break.
I pulled in my lower lip. The chapped skin adhered to the ridge of my upper teeth. I drew a breath through my nostrils. Then I forced air against the lip and the teeth, and at the mere thought of voicing the word’s first vowel, my esophagus clenched in a wrenching seizure. What air I could snatch was quickly released in frantic nasal snorts. I could have strummed the tendons in my neck like the strings of a lyre. It went on, this strangulation from the inside, for more than two minutes.
When it was over, I triggered it again.
So commenced the process—who could have known how long it would take?—of using the convulsive power of my stutter to jolt my vocal folds from the atrophy that set in seven months after I went silent as a seven-year-old boy. Once the heavy chain that choked and tethered me, my stutter had become the key to my finding a place in the world—outside of this child’s room, far from