The narrator of Eliza Barry Callahan’s “The Hearing Test” is an artist in her late twenties named Eliza who lives in New York City. She wakes up one morning in August with a buzz in her ear that’s accompanied by the sound of “perpetually rolling thunder.” “It’s like God adjusting his piano stool but never getting around to the song,” she says. Her dog’s bark is “distorted and distant.” Her own voice sounds unfamiliar, the volume “dialed up and the pitch . . . shifted.” She’s supposed to board a plane to Venice that afternoon—her friend is getting married—so she rushes to an emergency clinic, where a nurse praises the cleanliness of her ears and a doctor administers a hearing test. Afterward, he announces, cryptically, “Bad luck.” The words have the ring of a diagnosis.
Eliza has come down with a medical ailment called sudden sensorineural hearing loss, or sudden deafness for short. “The Hearing Test” loosely tracks the next year in her life. Experts warn that her condition is unlikely to get any better and could get worse; Eliza starts to prepare “for everything to be the quietest version of itself before disappearing altogether, in a cloak of itself.” As the symphony of the world softens, her own body gets louder. “When I blinked,” she reports, “I could hear my eyelids meeting—dull and dense like a head hitting the pillow.”
Like a lot of autofiction, the book monitors the daily routine of a solitary narrator in an urban milieu. Callahan writes suggestively about how a sick ear might translate sound. (“The street was in my kitchen—the hum of passing cars was now coming from somewhere near my stove and sounded like bees.”) Her main focus, though, is on Eliza’s generalized depression, anger, and fear. Eliza goes to doctors’ appointments, shops for groceries, works with a hypnotherapist over Zoom, sees friends, stays with her ex and his new girlfriend in Los Angeles, travels with her mother to Europe, and thinks about art, particularly by blind or deaf artists. Undercurrents of financial anxiety and financial reprieve tangle throughout: although many of her doctors waive their fees because of the unusual nature of her case, she has no income and is running down her savings.
Eliza’s emotions develop a muffled quality. During one hypnotherapy session, she wonders how “it was possible that I could be experiencing such extreme degrees of fear and boredom at once.” Her interactions with others—a friend who sends back her paella and complains about her narcissistic mother; a painter “whose subject was primarily herself”; a stranger at the market who takes the piece of fish that Eliza was eying—shimmer with suppressed hostility. I thought of the outwardly dispassionate but sharply motivated observations of Rachel Cusk in her “Outline” trilogy, a clear influence here. In a way that echoes Cusk’s writing, Eliza’s descriptions and judgments about her surroundings throw her inner life into relief: they seem designed to direct attention to how her mind moves. Callahan also shares Cusk’s flair for seeding strange and piquant details into the speech of her narrator’s interlocutors. One of Eliza’s neighbors “said her storage unit was just a mausoleum for her two Italian greyhounds—named S and M—who had died within days of each other. . . . When the dogs had played, she said, they would chase each other in circles and often become one beautiful silver sphere that looked like it was floating.”
In “Outline,” the narrator’s divorce only gradually emerges as the novel’s central subject—the source of the book’s free-floating disaffection. The origins of Eliza’s sadness and anger are similarly oblique in “The Hearing Test.” Deafness might explain it, but so might Eliza’s relationship with her ex, a filmmaker who continues to desultorily pursue her even after he moves across the country for another woman. We get only snippets of interaction between the former lovers and almost none of their backstory, but what we do know is damning. Eliza’s ex talks past her and criticizes her for small things. He invites her to a gallery and, after she shows up thirty minutes late, claims that he has to leave soon, prompting her to reflect that, although “I had always considered myself to be a respectful person,” he “had historically made me feel like a disrespectful person.”
Callahan’s writing emits the most heat in these scenes of romantic malaise, in which the filmmaker works on Eliza’s perceptions and psyche almost as deafness does: both seem to produce a sort of poetic alienation, a sensitivity that tips over into numbness. In a Cusk-like home-renovation metaphor, Eliza compares her ex to “a termite that finds its way inside the walls of a house. And the termite, like a perfect houseguest, has a sense when it’s stayed just long enough. Just long enough to have pushed the house to its absolute brink. Then it goes and leaves the house empty, eroded. I had once loved him.”
Heartbreak and hearing loss are either symbols for each other or paired expressions of something deeper: a fundamental out-of-tune-ness that is beguilingly present in Callahan’s style. Eliza’s voice sounds, at first listen, slightly discordant, slightly wrong. “I have a habit, since I can remember, of reading plot summaries of movies and books before watching or reading them,” she says, when introducing herself. The repetition of “reading” and the faint awkwardness of “since I can remember” have a back-footing effect, hinting at elements lost in translation. Elsewhere, Callahan’s synesthetic language troubles the distinctions between senses. Frequent ellipses represent sound trailing off (“I always seem to begin things late at night . . .”), and the narrator’s thoughts can follow a punning, playful logic. The name of her audiologist, Robert Walther, leads her to meditate on the artist Robert Walser; songs circling a room are audio “flies, the living anagram of files.” Her summaries of other people’s speech proliferate non sequiturs—is it because the people she talks to don’t connect their thoughts, or because she can only make out every other sentence? “The Hearing Test” can feel like a book made out of dropped calls, grainy images, and shut doors. As her hearing worsens, Eliza says, “the presence of things made me more aware of the way I was experiencing their absence.”
Callahan is interested in the accidental meanings that arise from errors. What forms of understanding are possible, she asks, when you subtract or garble various senses, various modes of knowing? Mild spoiler: Eliza’s deafness goes into remission near the end of the year. This gives her tryst with silence a bounded quality and allows Callahan to treat it poetically, as a break from everyday life, rather than logistically, as the beginning of a process of learning to navigate the world anew. Eliza wonders about people’s motives and behavior. She thinks about the impenetrability of minds, landscapes, and dreams. For Callahan, who sprinkles the book with flashbacks from before Eliza’s diagnosis, deafness is both a medical condition and a metaphor for the incompleteness of our knowledge of the world. Even as a child, Eliza says, she was prone to misconstruals: when her French teacher, who spoke with a heavy accent, referred to the “apostles” on the roof of Notre Dame, she thought the lesson was about “apple sauce.” The book implies that, because our senses lie, ambiguity and mystery indicate a nearness to the truth. In Eliza’s case, the unknowability of reality leads to a further turn inward: maybe the most honest way to understand a life in which you are doomed to get things wrong is to deliberately misinterpret. Eliza, struggling to follow her ex-boyfriend’s speechifying, lets her thoughts drift across what he might or might not be saying, observing the way that her imagination fills in the gaps. “Our misinterpretations,” she proposes, might be “the most individual and specific things we have.”
At times, Callahan seems to privilege the metaphor of sensory deprivation over the concrete reality of hearing loss. In one of the novel’s most breathtakingly crafted passages, Eliza finds herself in a threesome:
Occurring near the end of the book, the scene closes with a woman blowing out a candle and whispering good night. A man has made tea. The narrator falls into a reverie that doubles as an acknowledgment of loves that are no less real for being soon forgotten. You might read this episode as a healing encounter in which Eliza discovers pleasure and tenderness in not knowing. (What is the “something” in “something searched me”? The ambiguity is tantalizing rather than painful.) But hearing, the sense that Eliza longs for, would not spoil the lovely mystery of who or what is searching. A faculty she still has—sight—is likelier to do that.
Callahan toggles back and forth between the language of hearing and the language of vision, using them seemingly interchangeably. She suggests that silence has made Eliza a spectator to her life: in the book’s preface, Eliza presents the work to come as the record of “a year in which I was flung suddenly from my own life, only to learn that to see something in its entirety is to be entirely outside of that thing.” Yet running alongside Eliza’s belief that she has been expelled from her own experience is a parallel suggestion that she has got closer to the heart of it. “I could hear my voice more clearly now,” Eliza says, after her diagnosis. “I had become nearer to myself.”
Does silence help Eliza see the world more clearly, or does it allow her to attend more closely to her own inner voice? The question may be a nitpick, but it points to a larger lack of clarity around the effects of going deaf. At times, the novel seems to want to distinguish between comprehension and immersion, knowing and feeling. And, at times, it maps that distinction onto the distinction between sight and sound, proposing an inverse relationship between the senses. It’s an interesting idea, but, elsewhere, the dichotomy is collapsed or abandoned, as when Callahan writes about “veils” of sound being cleared away to reveal the “image” of reality.
“The Hearing Test” adopts a meandering, associative structure, recording happenstance events and strangers’ speeches, but without the attention to an underlying pattern paid by writers such as Cusk or W. G. Sebald. The novel is full of motifs, echoes, and coincidences, seemingly intended to cloak the narrator’s intimate impressions in coolly haunted language. Everyday details develop an aura of hooded implication. The coded expressiveness of a red dog leash feels profound. But because Callahan’s intentions are muddled, the novel’s particulars aren’t allowed to accrue any significance beyond themselves. They have no scaffolding around which to cohere. This makes them vulnerable to accusations of randomness, as when Eliza launches into an extended story about how her mother, an equine vet, was called to a mobster’s farm in the middle of the night to walk a sick Arabian horse around a field until the sun rose. The episode is arresting—the kind of anecdote that would go over well on a date or at a party—but it’s not meaningfully connected to the rest of the novel.
Although Eliza’s social life inspires her to introspect, often wryly, distinctively, or charmingly, she doesn’t narrate her relationships to others. In the book’s final pages, she confesses that she “had gone to great lengths to spare the feelings of others at the expense of being truthful with myself . . . I had a terrible fear of hurting people because I had decided from a young age that I was good.” The moment is mounted and spotlighted as a catharsis of some kind, but I knew so little about what she was referring to that I felt almost guilty for eavesdropping.
Perhaps it’s unfair to blame Callahan for this shapelessness, since, per the conventions of autofiction, it is Eliza who is supposed to be making the creative decisions. She’s taken notes on her year of hearing loss and turned them into the text we are reading; she’s edited and arranged this material. But it is worth asking what sort of book Eliza is trying to write. She seems to have fallen into a contemporary trap of believing that a self-aware sentience on the page is sufficient to prompt an aesthetic impression in others. If there is a pattern organizing her work, it is simply the “I”: I did this. I thought that. Individual details, instead of coalescing into a shape, however faint, are bound together by the fact that Eliza touched them, as if they were scrolling by on a social-media feed, inviting bursts of identification, of Likes. The book swarms with references to artists and thinkers who have experienced or theorized sensory deprivation, but these mostly function to aerate the first-person narrative and to show the breadth of Eliza’s reading.
Ultimately, Eliza’s observations add up to a character study, an illumination of Eliza via the types of things that she notices. This isn’t in itself a bad thing, but it makes the gestures toward themes of sensory deprivation feel tacked on. Likewise, the autofictional structure scans less as a comment on unreliable perceptions or constructed reality than as a way for Callahan to disown Eliza’s desire for self-display—or even to critique it. The resulting reading experience, which intertwines the validations of recognition and judgment, can offer a lot of pleasure, but on its own, in 2024, it is starting to yield diminishing returns. A character who thinks about herself a lot, and a novelist who is interested in pointing that out, can be the beginning of art. They just can’t be the end of it. ♦
