One of the more intriguing if under-explored relationships in literature is that of the senses. Not often are protagonists sensory disabled, perhaps one assumption being that they wouldn’t make for compelling narrators or protagonists. Deafness and music, for example, have a complicated relationship, estranged at best but not entirely disconnected. Beethoven was deaf when he composed his ninth symphony; the award-winning Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie has been deaf since the age of twelve. And while not a literary work, the 2019 film the Sound of Metal, about a drummer slowly losing his hearing, brought attention to this occurence via an Oscar-nominated drama.
This is the premise of writer and musician Eliza Barry Callahan’s debut novel The Hearing Test (Catapult, 2024) which follows Eliza, an eponymous composer who wakes one morning with a rolling buzz in her head. One doctor’s appointment later and she’s been diagnosed with sudden deafness. Her hearing will fade and fast, leaving Eliza reeling.
Written in a diaristic stream-of-conscious style, Eliza’s thoughts drift along and unfold as a series of observations of others, intimate portraits of those closest to her and, as she tries to reconfigure the actions and meanings, of herself:
In the mornings, I had a new routine. Over decaffeinated coffee, I thought about my profession. I was incapable of specificity. I would think in big sweeping thoughts. I thought about what I would still like to profess. I thought about what was foreclosed and what wasn’t. I thought about the slow drain of my bank account like a leak that was unaccounted for — the caulking! I thought about making something of nothing. I thought about making nothing of nothing. And finally, nothing of something. Each presented its own challenge.
One major challenge is how, with the rapid loss of her hearing, Eliza communicates with those around her, where the risk of misunderstanding or mishearing shifts from a fraught possibility to a given. Listening to the reminiscences of a family friend who is approaching the end of their life, “She said it was terrible that I would go deaf at my age, and I said it was terrible she would die at hers. She laughed and said she would rather die than go deaf.”
Mirroring the protagonist’s diminishing sense of sound, interactions between Eliza and those around her are limited, oftentimes reduced to visual cues and information Eliza gleans from a distance. Exemplified by broad descriptions of those tertiary characters one becomes familiar with while dwelling in an urban setting, “The following day, I saw Miss Baltic Sea in the entryway, and she was not blue and horizontal, she was blond and vertical, and unable to remove her mail key from the mailbox.”
Characters are referred to by their occupation or relation to the protagonist (the filmmaker ex, the hypnotherapist, Eliza’s little black dog) anonymous figures silhouetted in the narrative’s peripheral mist. There is an intention here, a modernist’s approach to first-person narration, where Callahan’s dialogue dwells among the action, and dreamy sequences requiring astute reading.
She asked me if my mother was from South America; she said that I didn’t look entirely white. I told her that I was entirely white. She said my eyes were so far apart. She said she wanted to know me better and touched my hand. She said she understood why he had loved me. She said that she read his emails but it was okay, he knew that she did this. Her hand rested on top of mine while she spoke and eventually she started drawing figure eights with her pointer finger between my knuckles. I told her that I was falling asleep. For me, it was 3:00 a.m.
Like other novels written with a memoirist’s sensibility, The Hearing Test captures that nebulous quality that comes from leaving your twenties; the process of reevaluating friendships, your sense of self, and, in Eliza’s case, how to move forward and create especially when under threat of losing your instrument for hearing. As for instruments of creating and playing with sound, these hardly go mentioned.
As a composer herself, it’s confounding that Callahan has Eliza avoid the profound changes she must be experiencing in her relationship to music. There are no scenes or ruminations, for example, of her picking up anything to play. Losing hearing doesn’t mean you forget how to play, only that the feel of sticking a drum or buzzing a reed on your lips will have taken on some new significance.
So while Eliza’s hearing loss isn’t her choice, the decision not to talk anymore about music, to mute her novel, so to speak, is very much hers. Her focus is directed on how destabilized her connections to people have become. The memory of a past interaction, for example, where she and someone else disconnected over some topic, causes her to reflect on the now very present possibility of not being understood—and of not understanding. This realization is not nuanced as inherently bad or good, only demonstrated as a moment of clarity.
I had begun to understand my own life by way of misinterpreting things I was reading and experiencing with only half of my attention. I found clarity in misinterpretation. And I thought that our misinterpretations are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have.
Callahan’s felicity with language injects what could be a morose telling of ambiguous illness with moments of levity and observational humor. For example, the batting cages near the clinic where Eliza’s hearing test is administered are named after former MLB World Series champion John Rodriguez—John’s Cages. This passing moment leads to an aside about John Cage, the composer of indeterminate music, and a noted performance of his composition, 4’33”.
The influence of W. G. Sebald hovers over the work. Asking her doctor, Robert Walther, PhD – Audiology, if he is familiar with the work of Swiss writer Robert Walser sends Eliza on a considerable aside about Walser’s work and influence on later writers. It’s the doctor’s succinct “I have not” that brings us back to the narrative present, showing the great gulf between where Eliza’s thoughts reside and where real life takes place.
These whirling perambulations between memory, present-day interactions, and reflections on the historic creates the sense that this is not solely another navel-gazing missive but rather a woman asserting that there is value and artistry to be found in a thoroughly examined life. Her ruminations on the creative process and what it means when your sense of self is upended through a series of small violences capture the mundanity in trudging through a long-term illness.
In service of this examination, Eliza starts using a notebook to document her illness: the deterioration of her hearing, the anti-inflammatory meals prepared, the procedures and medicines taken to slow if not prevent total hearing loss. The notebook is presented as a compelling and compulsion-inducing response to loss of control. However, Callahan’s unsentimental prose (well served throughout the novel) results in entries reading like impersonal updates, not stakes driven indicators of her well-being.
Contrast this with her portrait of “The Buzzer,” an always-on radio transmission made up of “a low, long, buzzing drone” listened to all over the world for the hope of catching an infrequent interruption to the broadcast, a signal from extraterrestrials. Included in this portrait are sketches of people who tune into the broadcast, its history of discovered anomalies, and a peek at the way we find comfort through isolated yet shared experiences.
The notebook, full of mixed observational material like this, can read like a series of Wiki explorations, but it serves another purpose: along with her small dog, it is her only companion and tool during a year of observation and self-monitoring:
I used to love challenge, I thought. I thought variations of these thoughts while removing the stray hairs from the edge of the sink or applying lotion or emptying out things from the fridge that had gone bad or checking to see if I had received a text message or wondering what I should be doing in that very moment.
Toward the end of the book Eliza and her mother travel to Italy, a trip delayed a year due to the onset of her hearing loss. These passages are this slim novel’s warmest, with the bodily ease and established rapport between the two women occurring amid the vibrancy of exploring an old city. There is even a sparkle of exploring a new flirtation after a long period of being single.
Earlier sections included sex, wry recounts of random interactions, contemplations on sound and silence; in this last chapter, however, there’s a shift as Eliza asserts the actions and people around her, driving situations into being. “It was very hot in the room and I switched on the white fan and pointed it toward her and I felt like God for this one second. For dinner I put on a red shirt, which is unlike me.”
Concluding this meandering contemplative tale on a hopeful note may simply exist as a reflection of Callahan’s lived experience. Like any debut, there are lacunae, but Callahan’s deft hand, bobbing and weaving down these many avenues of thought, suggests a promising confidence from a writer just getting started.
