‘I cried when it was all over’: the actor who brought 120 characters to life | Audiobooks

In the winter of 2009, Nick Sullivan received what would become his most daunting commission. “They sent me this huge cardboard box,” says the actor and audiobook narrator. “This was back before books were digitised. They told me it was long – and that I had as much time as I wanted to work on it. Uh-oh, I thought, that’s unusual. That’s when I went online and discovered all about JR.”

Written by William Gaddis, the Manhattan-born late modernist, JR was published in 1975, 20 years after the author’s first huge novel, The Recognitions, had been met with confusion, anger and indifference. JR tells the story of JR Vansant, an 11-year-old latchkey kid in Massapequa, New York, who – over the course of 700-plus pages – assembles a vast and corrupt financial empire, while all around him adults struggle and flounder.

Gaddis, who said JR was “a commentary on [America’s] free enterprise system running out of control”, spent 15 years writing the book, funded by arts grants and PR work for corporate giants. Once again, numerous critics were foxed. The New York Times deemed it “stupefying”, the New Yorker “unreadable”. Yes, it won the National Book Award but it rarely accrued many readers. Even Jonathan Franzen, in a 2002 article that attempted to revive interest in Gaddis’s work, described JR as “chilly, mechanistic and exhausting”. He implied that he’d never finished it.

So how did Sullivan, who has been in the audiobook game for 25 years, find it? “You don’t get too far into JR,” he says, “before you realise it’s almost all written in unattributed dialogue. There is an early scene, set in a school principal’s office, where something like five characters are speaking at once. It’s just this cacophony of voices.”

Actually, around 90% of JR is in unattributed dialogue, with only dashes and ellipses to indicate when a character starts and stops speaking or, more accurately, is interrupted. Although occasionally punctuated by dreamlike scene changes, JR is a teeming operatic racket, an anarchic satire of US capitalism where the flailing voices of more than 120 characters – plus snatches of adverts, news bulletins and TV broadcasts – bellow over one other. There are no chapter breaks, no section breaks, just plots within plots and themes within themes, as our schoolboy antihero gradually amasses a huge portfolio and, in the process, destroys the lives of the people around him.

“When you narrate an audiobook,” says Sullivan, “you find voices for the characters as you work through the book. In this case, that was impossible. I needed to know who they all were beforehand.” Using a site called williamgaddis.org, which broke JR down into scenes defined by each character’s entrance and exit, Sullivan fastidiously worked through the huge pile of pages, colour-coding each of the 50-plus main characters and sketching out their biographies.

“Normally,” says Sullivan, in his southern drawl, “I can prep a book in two or three days. I worked on JR for a month and a half.” In the process, however, the novel came alive, its roll call of struggling artists, exhausted teachers, corrupt financiers, con artists and degenerates, all gradually taking form through their maddening series of verbal tics and mannerisms.

“It’s one of the best books I’ve ever come across in terms of being translatable to audio,” he says. “So much of it is already there, in the phonetic way Gaddis writes dialogue. Occasionally there would be long, long sentences where you’d realise too late which character was speaking. But once I got rolling, I was inhabiting each character, all their unfulfilled dreams and frustrations.”

There is a pyrotechnical madness to JR, a comic polyphony of confused and conniving voices, all muttering ever onwards towards entropy and collapse. It can be overwhelming. “Working on JR consumed my life,” says Sullivan. “I’d be going for TV auditions for Law & Order, but prepping one of Gaddis’s scenes when I should have been looking at my lines. The book flows from one scene to another in such a torrent it felt impossible to take a break. I turned down offers of work so I could stay home and work on JR.”

Sullivan found himself wanting to stay longer and longer in the recording booth: “I wasn’t much fun to be around. There is a character called Jack Gibbs who always sounds exhausted. So sometimes I’d read until 3am, till I was getting worn out, just because I knew it would sound like Gibbs. When it was all over, I cried.”

It was the most rewarding narration job I ever had

Somewhat fittingly, when Sullivan’s 37-hour reading was released in 2011, it received little fanfare. But over the years, it has amassed a steady fanbase. That number is almost certain to grow now that JR has just been republished in a beautiful new edition by New York Review of Books Classics, along with Sullivan’s version. Now a writer himself, Sullivan continues to bat for Gaddis and has voiced five of the late author’s works. He still considers JR “the most rewarding narration job I have ever had”.

The novel now has another shot at being recognised as the great American novel that many think it is. Sullivan certainly thinks its time has come. “JR is about the din of everyday life,” he says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that, if he’d written it today, he’d spend a quarter of the book lambasting social media. Even I don’t read for pleasure any more. Instead of getting into bed and reading Steinbeck, I’m looking at Facebook and scrolling through the newsfeed. I’m sure Gaddis would kick my ass from beyond the grave if he knew that.”

• Nick Sullivan’s reading can be found at audible.com. More information at nicksullivan.net.