Review by Booklist Review
In this quietly electrifying debut, a young composer who makes her living scoring short films loses her hearing over the course of a year and contends with making new sense of her life and the world. Recently out of a relationship and overwhelmed by the New York City soundscape outside of her apartment, the protagonist, who remains nameless until the book's end, quickly reorients her life around doctor's appointments, prescriptions, and her dog's routine needs. Brief phone calls and encounters with her mother, a filmmaker and former boyfriend, and a few others punctuate her solitude, but works of art become her primary touchpoints. For example, on the way to weekly hearing tests, she passes a batting facility called "John's Cages," prompting a reflection on the composer John Cage's "4'33"--a work consisting of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Though we are treated to her philosophical and aesthetic reflections, they are relayed concretely and directly; the tone is entirely unsentimental. (In a brief preface, the narrator frames the book as an account of "the stark, inescapable facts of a situation.") This is a special novel with a style reminiscent of Magda Szabó's The Door and whose commitment to making sense of everyday existence calls to mind Tom McCarthy's Remainder.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Callahan debuts with a magnificent stream-of-consciousness narrative portraying a young New York City artist as her hearing deteriorates. The unnamed narrator wakes one August morning to a droning in her right ear that causes everything to sound distorted. After a hearing test, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness and referred to a series of specialists. The narrator's diaristic account of more tests, hypnotherapy, clinical trials, and her declining hearing over the ensuing months is shaped by her various relationships and changing circumstances. In October, she receives a visit from her unnamed ex-boyfriend, who wants to say goodbye to the dog they once shared before he moves to Los Angeles. In November, she calls a friend of her mother's who's dying from cancer and tells the friend it's "terrible she would die at ," to which the friend jokingly replies she'd "rather die than go deaf." The narrator finds solace on hearing loss forums, where many people report hearing the same "phantom songs" ("Amazing Grace," "Silent Night," "The Star-Spangled Banner"), and ruminates in beautiful prose on the idea of silence ("Being in the presence of things made me more aware of the way I was experiencing their absence--everything existed in a silhouette"). It adds up to a bracing immersion into the world of the senses. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
