A good take a look at of a author is to take a excessive idea and stretch it. In The Listening to Check, the debut novel by American Eliza Barry Callahan, a younger girl loses her listening to – or most of it – with out warning. At some point, she hears a “deep drone”, after which her listening to is all “rolling thunder… like God adjusting his piano stool however by no means getting round to the music”.
When having her sudden deafness investigated, medical doctors inform her she has sudden deafness, a analysis that reiterates the query it seeks to reply. The issue is intimately shut however unattainable to resolve. “We are able to get to the moon, however we are able to’t get to the inside ear,” she’s informed. Because of this, her remedy is “a piece of improvisation. Like jazz.”
Or like this novel, which has a loosely structured really feel, usually to pleasant impact. There are quite a few sensible scenes of the narrator navigating her new life. Her eccentric landlady cheerfully shares that a few of Hitchcock’s Rear Window was filmed within the courtyard, which is “very humorous,” she tells her, as a result of “when she lived within the condominium the tremendous had truly murdered a tenant”.
Within the absence of medical assist, she turns to friends on on-line boards. There, two males debate the deserves of clubbing close to a college for the deaf, the place “you’ll be able to say all types of stuff you’ve at all times wished to say within the sheets”. The expertise for the narrator is all-consuming – “it felt much less like I used to be going by means of one thing and extra like I had change into the factor” – however the act of writing balances it out. “To see one thing in its entirety is to be completely exterior that factor.”
Maybe that is why the main target shifts steadily away from deafness and in direction of sight: one sense compensating for an additional. The story turns into more and more visible, together with Zoom calls, a film-maker and the pursuit of a comet. However this additionally makes it meander farther from its distinctive origins and nearer to well-trodden territory.
When the narrator brings in different writers similar to Robert Walser or Clarice Lispector, the impact is double-edged. Their phrases add texture (Lispector: “Earlier than going to mattress, as if placing out a candle, she blew out the little flame of the day”), however in addition they remind us that these writers would by no means ship a line as woolly or awkward as “I felt within the current like I used to be residing at all times alongside what a earlier physique had felt like”. Nonetheless, it is a debut that largely delivers attention-grabbing issues, and guarantees higher ones to come back.
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