Shouters
By Steve Martin
 

Our fast-paced modern age has made it impractical to read books that are more than a hundred and twenty-six pages long. Yet so many classic books and recently published books are as thick as they are wide. What are we to do? One answer is the Shouters. These are a small number of dedicated people who assign themselves randomly to various individuals, follow them around at a respectful distance, and shout out thick time-consuming literature, sentence by sentence. If you know anyone who has ever had a Shouter, you know there is something remarkably calming about a voice thirty, or forty yards away that is speaking aloud, say, "Airport," or "Being and Nothingness." Shouting is also a twenty-four-hour-a-day effort, and as the sun sets, and day is transformed into night, so, too, is the voice transformed, as one Shouter is relieved by another. Sometimes a mellifluous male is replaced with a soothing female at a chapter change of "Madame Bovary." As one gets ready for bed, the tuneful prose keeps on coining through the bedroom window, and, occasionally, one wakes in the night to hear the voice still reciting, undaunted, from under a neighbor's oak. In the morning, there is yet another new voice and another new chapter, and the meaning of each paragraph drifts into the consciousness during gargling.

At first, having a Shouter makes it hard to concentrate on the work of the day, the phone calls, the meetings, driving -- yes, a Shouter will follow your car with a bullhorn -- but soon the Shouting blends comfortably into daily life. It becomes easy to exist both in the real world and in the world of literature that is hovering on the periphery Sometimes it is easy to get confused: Was it Uriah Heep who called? Is Scrooge my accountant? Is my husband out whale-hunting? One executive, whose Shouter had been reciting Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" for several weeks, swooned when he bit into a tea cake and remembered every Super Bowl score of the nineteen-eighties. But eventually the brain starts compartmentalizing everything, and life again feels normal. In fact, the constant proximity to the other world, the one that is written about and dreamed about by writers, enhances the world we live in: one's wife seems more beautiful and more complex, a husband more charming and daring.

Shouters have a certain calm about them. They approach their work like Buddhas, in peace and with quiet forcefulness. Becoming a Shouter is a mystical process; one day the Shouter and the Shoutee just find themselves attached. It seems to be a young person's job, and many people in high-powered positions used to be Shouters. It is hard to imagine that the perspiring finance worker in the next cubicle was once standing on a rooftop calling out the final paragraph of "The Good Earth" into the window of a fifth-floor co-op on the Upper East Side, or that the jovial TV newswoman was once on a boat in the Caribbean shouting out "The Brothers Karamazov" as she sailed alongside the corporate yacht Belinda's Bottom.

Who is picked to have a Shouter? It can be anyone, but "overworked" is an adjective that seems to apply to those lucky enough to be selected. Trump, Starr, Tyson are just a few of the busy luminaries whose lives have been subtly altered by Shouters. There may be resistance at first, particularly if an aggressive Shouter leaves paragraphs of Philip Roth on one's voice mail and is often the annoying caller on line three, anxious to finish Chapter 7 of "The Carpetbaggers." But in time the Shouter is accepted. And, amazingly, if several people with Shouters find themselves in the same room, even amid the cacophony each can focus on his Shouter with ease, sometimes listening to two or three novels at the same time with no complications.

A Shouter leaves as quietly as he or she appears, sometimes after a single book has been read aloud, sometimes after several, but never before the job is done and mutual satisfaction has been attained. A Shoutee wakes up in the morning, noticing something is different but unsure of what it is. The orange juice is drunk, the coffee sipped. Is the radio off? The car is started, pulled out of the driveway. The voice is gone.


* From The New Yorker, September 11, 2000, p. 50, the "Shouts & Murmurs" section.