THE HEARING TEST

A year in the life of a young New Yorker who has a condition that causes progressive deafness.

As this work of philosophical fiction opens, it’s August 29, 2019, and the narrator is about to fly to Venice to attend a friend’s wedding. But, she says, “When I awoke that morning, I felt a deep drone in my right ear accompanied by a sound I can best compare to a large piece of sheet metal being rocked, a perpetually rolling thunder.” Doctors are consulted, the trip is canceled, courses of treatment are begun. The novel then proceeds by recounting the narrator’s experiences and observations over the next 12 months. Though there’s no plot to speak of, Callahan’s debut features a number of interesting characters—an ex-boyfriend who’s a filmmaker in L.A. and his current girlfriend as well as the narrator’s mother, landlord, neighbors, and small black dog. Constantly interrogating her condition, she often refers to other artists, writers, composers, and works of art, finding unusual connections among them. A visit to an audiologist named Robert Walther leads to the thought that “days before, in bed, I had been reading a book titled A Little Ramble written by a group of visual artists in response to the work of Robert Walser, a writer whom artists always embarrassingly seem to think belongs to them like a secret.” The audiologist goes on to administer a hearing test that’s recorded like a list poem: “Say the word wince. / Wince. / Say the word want. / Want. / Say the word war. / War.” And so on. A sentence that appears near the end reflecting on the narrator’s experiences of the preceding year seems to apply just as much to the experience of the person reading the text that recounts them. “I was thinking that if you think about something long enough, it will make sense even if you haven’t made any sense of it at all—you’ve just gotten used to it.” The impression of a sly, subtle joke shared between reader and author is a frequent treat of Callahan’s prose style.

A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch.