- Narrator: Michael Crouch builds distinct, sustained voices for the Salt and Jenkins families across a fifteen-hour multigenerational span, technically accomplished character work with no shortcuts.
- Subjects: The long debt of one secret shared between two families, moral reckoning across decades, small-town Ohio as American mirror
- Tone: Slow-burning and intimate, the patient unfolding of consequence rather than event
- Bottom line: Patrick Ryan's multigenerational Ohio novel is among the more structurally serious literary fiction audiobooks of recent years, Crouch's performance is the right vehicle for a novel that demands and rewards long attention.
Cal Jenkins, a man rejected by the military for a physical condition he did not choose, spends the postwar celebration at the center of Patrick Ryan's novel in a state of shame so heavy it practically has its own gravitational field. He made one irreversible mistake on the night of the Allied victory in Europe, and Buckeye, across fifteen-plus hours of audiobook, follows the consequences of that mistake as they spread through two Ohio families across three decades. I started listening on a slow evening with no strong expectations, Ryan was new to me, and by the midpoint of the novel I had reorganized my schedule to finish it.
The Jenna Bush Hager endorsement on the cover might tempt some listeners to reach past it, the way Book Club stamps sometimes signal a certain warm-and-redemptive family saga you've read before. Buckeye is more structurally rigorous than that framing suggests. Ryan is not writing toward emotional resolution, he is examining the specific way secrets warp ordinary lives over long periods. Cal's transgression is understandable, Margaret's circumstances are sympathetic, and yet the rippling damage to people who had no part in the original moment is documented with extraordinary patience and care.
Bonhomie, Ohio, Returns to the Same Four Lives
The novel's scope is its primary technical challenge and its greatest accomplishment. Ryan covers the postwar boom, the suburban expansion of Bonhomie, Ohio, the social disruptions of the sixties and seventies, and the private transformations of four central characters across all of it, without the narrative ever losing its grip on the intimacy that makes the material meaningful. The structure is not linear but cyclical, returning to the same characters at different points in time, asking what changed and what did not. That formal choice is the right one for this material.
Trying to Make Right What He'd Gotten Wrong
The central question the novel poses is not a melodramatic one but a moral one: what is a person's relationship to a mistake made in youth, and does there come a point at which it can be released? Cal's line, 'That, as he saw it now, was his life's work: trying to make right what he'd gotten wrong. Wasn't that a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes?', functions as the novel's quiet thesis, stated about a third of the way in, and Ryan spends the remaining two-thirds testing it from every angle.
Reviewers have noted that Buckeye reads like an epic while remaining intimate, that the characters from Bonhomie, Ohio carry enough weight to hold the historical sweep. That balance is real. Becky Jenkins, whose spiritual gifts allow her to communicate with the dead, could have been an eccentric device and instead becomes one of the more compelling portraits in the book. Ryan trusts his characters to carry meaning without forcing significance onto them.
Michael Crouch Ages a Voice Across Three Decades
Michael Crouch narrates, and for this specific material, multigenerational American literary fiction, Ohio setting, working and middle-class voices across several decades, he is precisely the right choice. Crouch has developed a particular skill with ensemble casts in long-form literary fiction, building vocal differentiation that holds across a novel's full length without resorting to exaggerated markers. Cal Jenkins sounds like a man formed by physical labor and private guilt; Margaret Salt sounds like a woman holding a long story very close. These characterizations are sustained, not performed in introductory chapters and then abandoned.
Crouch also handles period register thoughtfully. The postwar Midwest voice he finds for the earliest sections shifts gradually across the novel's three-decade span, tracking the cultural changes that Ryan's narrative describes in the prose. It is a performance that most listeners will absorb rather than notice, which is exactly the right outcome for a novel this long.
Ohio's Specific Setting Outweighs a Distracting Subplot
Listeners expecting narrative momentum in the thriller sense will find the novel's pace demanding. Ryan is not withholding information to manufacture tension; he is slowly revealing consequence, which is a different and quieter kind of engagement. The novel rewards patience, but that patience is genuinely required across fifteen hours.
The spiritual subplot, Becky Jenkins's ability to communicate with the dead, is woven through the novel without becoming its primary mode. Some readers in the reviews note finding this element more distracting than enriching. It functions symbolically rather than literally within the story's moral framework, but listeners who resist any supernatural register should know it is present throughout.
The Ohio setting is specific and treated with respect rather than used as generic Midwestern atmosphere. Listeners who know the region will find it rendered authentically; those who do not will get a portrait of a particular kind of American community that is more textured than most literary fiction provides.
Russo and Doerr Fans Will Feel at Home
Literary fiction listeners who loved Richard Russo's small-town moral weight, or who found Anthony Doerr's multigenerational structure in Cloud Cuckoo Land rewarding, will find Buckeye in a recognizable tradition. The Joyce Carol Oates Prize longlisting is a useful calibration point: Ryan is writing in that serious American literary mode, not the book-club-friendly warmth that the Today Show placement might suggest.
Listeners who find long character-driven fiction without strong external plot mechanics difficult will struggle here. Buckeye is precisely the kind of novel that requires you to trust the author with your time for a sustained period before the payoff becomes visible. For readers willing to make that investment, Michael Crouch's narration across fifteen-plus hours is among the better audiobook experiences available in American literary fiction.
