Barrelhouse Reviews: The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
Reviewed by Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira
Catapult / March 2024 / 176 pp
In The Hearing Test, Eliza Barry Callahan’s debut, doubles and twofold meanings abound. The narrator wakes up on August 29, 2019, to find out she has been struck with Sudden Deafness. Faced with the impending loss of her hearing, she decides to “keep score” of the following year, noting down everything from the dosages of her medications to her multiple doctor appointments to her encounters with a previous lover and his current girlfriend. Even the premise comes packaged in two layers: the choice of the expression “to keep score” is a reflection of the narrator’s interest in a movie’s musical score, which she connects to the word’s other meaning: “a map or directive, a tally, a musical accompaniment to a moving image. The score as a cut into a surface, and even indebtedness. How a score could be what leads me or a record of where I’ve been, or both at once. Not a representation of my reality but rather its analog.”
The narration becomes, then, in the context of the book, a tool. The narrator’s voice is cool and quiet, precise in her meandering to long descriptions of side characters that come across as her gift for observation being used as a mechanism to dissociate from reality. And it is a gift: the prose is clean and strategic, capable of alternating between crisp emotion and sharp humor. When describing her landlord’s art, for example, the narrator muses: “A fan of Pierre Bonnard, her subject was primarily herself and the paintings took form as conventional self-portraits and fragmented close-ups—oil on linen. A critic had compared them to the short stories of Chekhov. It seemed this critic was also a personal friend.” The restrained quality of the prose never hinders the pacing. On the contrary, Callahan’s narrator is relentlessly captivating, and being immersed in her mind always feels like a privilege.
The thread of dissociation persists in the language, in the narrator’s penchant for analogies. At times, her categorizing of silence seems obsessive: she defines it again and again, cramming it with various comparisons and metaphors. Silence is “dressed as an injury,” it is compared to a rip in a woman’s stockings, revealing a bare part of her leg. It could be “translucent or opaque,” or analogous to a small patch of red being viewed as less red than the red in a painted wall. A comet becomes “one prolonged silence in the sky.” It’s as if she’s feeling silence up, grabbing it with her hands and forcing it to take some concrete shape.
The desire for definition, for certainty and clarity, is another underlying thread in the novel. As hearing tests and various attempts at treatment consume her life, the narrator seems removed from time, set apart from it. The over-vigilance of keeping score, paradoxically, only increases that feeling: “I quickly learned that sick-time is to be acutely outside of time but acutely aware of its passage.” The heavy interiority on the page conveys the same sensation to the reader: despite the narrator’s constant updates on the chronological timeline, time feels like an external element to the novel, something we can only vaguely perceive, like a slight shadow.
In her timeless state, it’s fitting that Callahan’s narrator seeks out connection, both by taking the time to flesh out the various one-off figures she comes across (like the hypnotherapist’s wife, who recognises the gaucheness of lingering on the subject of Goya’s Pinturas Negras, but does so anyway; or the cab driver who responds to a question about his mother’s restaurant with “It’s a long story that ends in death”), and reconnecting with a former lover only referred to as “the filmmaker,” as well as his current partner, only referred to as “the girlfriend.” Their presence recurs in the novel, moments of proximity and company that only reinforce the narrator’s inherent loneliness. Both relationships seem fraught with melancholy, of things unsaid not because they’re secrets, but because they can’t be shaped with words. Still, the filmmaker makes vague gestures of attempted reconciliation: inviting her for dinner, kissing her, sleeping with her, and returning constantly to her life, despite his move to Los Angeles. Love, to him, “is obviously a form of haunting”—to which the narrator replies that she finds him to be “un-haunt-able, uninhabitable even for ghosts.”
The presence of the girlfriend, in the Los Angeles trip that occurs in the second half of the book, seems to break through an emotional barrier. An intimate encounter offers the possibility of openness, even if momentary, working as some kind of relief for the narrator, and a shining moment of delicate, subtle sensuality in the prose. Instead of positioning the protagonist’s sense of isolation as something to correct, the novel acknowledges the porous edges of loneliness, how often love slips in.
The core relationship, however, remains between the narrator and herself, between her body and its sudden, massive change. Despite gracefully dodging melodrama or sentimental language, The Hearing Test is ultimately a novel about loss—not just the loss of hearing, but the loss of a former self, a version of existence that has permanently left. But instead of the raw, pulsing flesh of grief, the narrative concerns itself with loss as an element inserted into the mundane. One can interrogate the mechanisms of this machine, its ins and outs, can poke it, can sink fingers into its crevasses and muse on its various textures. The preface lampshades this trait: “How I kept score 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. How I took one long walk around myself.” And as the walk curves and bends, going down endless spirals, all the reader wants is to follow until the very end.
Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira is a fiction writer who deals in the fantastical, the scary, and the weird. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she is a Brazilian writer exploring themes of change, transformation, the reasons we leave and the reasons we stay. She has an MFA in Fiction from University of Central Florida. Her work has been featured in Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan and The Deadlands. You can find her at fernandacoutinhoteixeira.com and on Instagram, @fercoutinhotex.