November 1, 2023
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 Szab�'s The Door and whose commitment to making sense of everyday existence calls to mind Tom McCarthy's Remainder.
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Starred review from January 29, 2024
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.