AUDIO BOOKS

Carol Shields wins the “you’ve come a long way baby” prize for her narration of “Larry’s Party” (Penguin Audiobooks, abridged, four cassettes, 6 hours, $24.95). While this prize may underwhelm the author, who won the 1995 Pulitzer for her novel “The Stone Diaries,” it should alert listeners to a marked improvement in her presentation.

Shields used to undermine her fiction by sounding as if she were inhaling the microphone. She would pop her Ps and swallow loudly. We may never mistake her for an actress, but she has developed a pleasant, soft style, maintaining a consistent pace and nailing down her book’s humor.

This story of an ordinary Canadian baby boomer isn’t quite up to the level of “The Stone Dairies” but nevertheless is a thoughtful prodding of one man’s human qualities. It has been abridged carefully--but one can’t help question the wisdom of excising any prose written with such charming candor. The author has burrowed deep inside her protagonist’s mind, smoothly revealing not only individualized traits but universal ones as well.

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Philip Roth also reveals those basic precepts we all share, but he does so in a much more gritty fashion than Shields. In “American Pastoral” (Dove Audio, unabridged, 12 cassettes, 16 hours, $50), Roth strips away the seemingly perfect layers of a seemingly perfect life, only to find suffering of majestic proportions.

As Roth feeds us bits and pieces of the life of a successful and wealthy glove manufacturer in Newark, N.J., we become so entangled in the tale that its considerable length is hardly noticeable.

Reader Ron Silver, with a natural urban cadence and great empathy for the protagonist, easily conveys rage and introspection, joy and sadness. He doesn’t do a bad stutter, either--but he does sometimes read so quickly that the words are lost. His manner is straightforward: He doesn’t rely on individual characterizations--a technique that works well, as the story is told mainly from one person’s perspective. Another plus: the brief musical interludes, far superior to the usual canned tripe piped into audio books. Some of these are eerie, some ponderous, some lighthearted. But each is matched to the passage it precedes.

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James Ellroy has a deep, deep voice and a manner that borders on brusque--a gruff style so suited to his raw and personal “My Dark Places” (Random House Audiobooks, abridged, two cassettes, 3 hours, $18) that one can’t imagine anyone else reading it.

One can, however, imagine an audio that has not been so severely truncated.

Ellroy has, shall we say, a thing for his late mother. She died when he was 10 and this book is about his search decades later for her killer. What Ellroy finds is himself. The audio doesn’t focus on this self-realization, but on his search for the strangler. His own downward spiral into, and eventual climb out of, the gutter are every bit as intriguing as his chronicle of the unsolved crime. You will find more of it in the printed version.

(Be forewarned: This is not for tender ears).

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Rochelle O’Gorman Flynn reviews audio books every four weeks. Next week: Margo Kaufman on mysteries.