Eliza Barry Callahan The Hearing Test

Annotation

When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the spectre of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year – a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned – while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog. Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters – with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers – making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.