AUDIO : ANONYMOUS MAKING A NAME FOR HIMSELF.

Byline: Dick Lochte and Tom Nolan Special to the Daily News

Long admired as a poet and proverbialist, Anonymous this year turned his (or her) pen to fiction. The result was one of the most talked-about novels of recent seasons, now available in an audio condensation: ``Primary Colors'' (Random House Audiobooks, three hours; $18).

Read by Blair Underwood, this tape abridgment contains many (but not all) of the main plot points of the book, which purposely hews close to our recent national political experience - a crisis-prone presidential campaign by the governor of a small Southern state.

The campaign is recounted through the eyes and voice of Henry Burton, grandson of a legendary civil rights leader who serves on the staff of seductively manipulative candidate Jack Stanton. Titillating questions of truth and authorship aside, ``Primary Colors'' is a slick and entertaining piece of writing.

Actor Underwood (``L.A. Law'') does a fine job with this audio version, which includes his uncanny impersonation of an activist character who sounds exactly like (but is not called) Jesse Jackson.

There's no hiding behind pseudonyms or fictional alter egos in ``Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (and Other Observations)'' (Dove Audio, three hours; $17.95), the author-performed audio abridgment of Al Franken's current book of broad political humor. Turning conservative talk-show host Limbaugh's own techniques of insult and ridicule against him, acknowledged liberal Franken launches a boorish but often hilarious assault on the ``big fat hypocrite'' and his following of ``fact-challenged ditto-heads.''

Franken supplements his mockery of Limbaugh with mockery of Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, Ross Perot, Generation Xers and various other figures - including himself, in a prolonged account of his supposed conflict with a research assistant, who's given equal time to paint a scorn-filled verbal portrait of Franken as a social-climbing fame-hungry closet conservative.

Equally askew is Franken's praise of Bill Clinton (``The greatest president of the 20th century'') and the Democratic coalition (``dispirited liberals, confused moderates, government employees, working-class gays, the voting poor and the nostalgic elderly. Oh yeah, plus labor'').

Franken, with his surrealistic ``Saturday Night Live'' brand of almost-equal opportunity contempt, is a bit like H.L. Mencken on hallucinogens. His impersonations of several public figures are sprinkled throughout, and there are sound bites from Franken's actual performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner (kinder, sharper and wittier than Don Imus').

Interspersed with the obvious buffoonery are some apparently actual anecdotes of Franken's peripheral encounters with the likes of Mo Udall, Bill Clinton and Ralph Reed. You'd almost have to be a big fat idiot not to find much to laugh at in this self-styled serving of ``cheap, tawdry, mean-spirited yet accurate bile.''

More satire may be found without much effort in ``The People's Choice'' (Soundelux Audio, five hours; $19.95), a self-described ``cautionary tale'' by ABC News political and media analyst Jeff Greenfield. Greenfield, who reads his own fiction here, has concocted a novel about the repercussions of a U.S. president-elect's accidental death.

As Greenfield reminds us, no one has really been elected until the Electoral College convenes to vote in December. And if the people's choice has gone on to that big polling place in the sky, the college members are not specifically required to tap his running mate for the top job. They can vote for whomever they want.

The resulting wheeling and dealing, wheedling and diddling make for an amusing, if slightly confusing (in abbreviated form, at least) comedy fable with an array of villains and very few real heroes. Just like real life, we suppose.

Greenfield's president-elect may be better off dead when you consider the plight of the U.S. president in David Baldacci's ``Absolute Power'' (Time Warner Audiobooks, three hours; $17). In the midst of an illicit assignation with his best friend's wife, he starts to slap the woman around. She responds by grabbing a nearby letter-opener and threatening to plunge it into his chest. Suddenly, two Secret Service agents are in the bedroom, shooting the woman to death.

Talk about your predicaments. The agents get the president out of there pronto, then go over the room as carefully as men of their special calling can, making it appear as if the victim was killed by a burglar. But, for purposes of a remarkably forced plot, they neglect to remove the most crucial piece of evidence, the letter-opener containing the prez's fingerprints.

Worse yet, they fail to notice that a real burglar has been in the walk-in safe the whole time, observing everything through the safe's one-way mirror.

If that's not enough to set the mind to reeling, the burglar's daughter just happens to be the former girlfriend of the book's protagonist, a promising young lawyer working for the president's former firm. That this rather preposterous yarn is now poised at the top of most best-seller lists is a testament to Baldacci's uncanny ability to unspool it in a compelling and intensely suspenseful manner.

On this adaption, reader Anthony Heald admirably aids and abets him in proving the importance of style over substance.

G.D. Gearino's ``What the Deaf-mute Heard'' (Audio Renaissance, three hours, abridged; $16.95) is a beguiling novel about greed, guile and chicanery. It chronicles the life and times of Sammy Ayers, left at age 10 by his mother in a bus station in Barrington, Ga.

Because he chooses not to speak, he is mistaken for a deaf-mute. As the years go by, this deception makes him the object of derision and ridicule. But it also provides him access to most, if not all, of the town's secrets. And don't think for a minute he doesn't eventually use them to get even for all the years of abuse.

Though Gearino's story bears some similarity to ``Forrest Gump,'' Sammy is not exactly a blissful innocent. He's a Gump with gumption and attitude. Narrator Barrett Whitener has an obvious affinity for Southern accents.

Just as Gearino conjures up the small Southern town of Barrington, Lillian Jackson Braun, in the course of numerous mystery novels about Jim Quilleran and his psychic Siamese cats, has created a wonderfully comfortable, if homicidally active, little Middle American town called Pickax.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) ``L.A. Law'' star Blair Underwood, left, read s ``Primary Colors,'' on audiotape in lieu of its author, who remains anonymous.

(2) no caption (Book cover - PRIMARY COLORS)