The Brooklyn Rail

In this lyrical and moving debut, a young composer wakes up to a strange droning noise in one ear that becomes a diagnosis of Sudden Deafness, and she must come to terms with a pervasive and growing silence. When she receives the diagnosis, the narrator, Eliza, starts a journal: “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 … I took one long walk around myself … I wrote it down—the stark, inescapable facts of a situation.” Although she interacts with other people, the story is told from her point of view with dialogue summarized; even active scenes hold a sense of detachment. I’m usually annoyed by this type of almost passive writing but here it’s done with such skill that it illustrates the narrator’s gradual withdrawal from the hearing world.

Living alone in a studio in New York, Eliza works as a composer writing scores for various projects. It’s a precarious life, and part of her journaling is a record of her dwindling funds, adding to the anxiety as the text moves forward, “I thought about the slow drain of my bank account like a leak that was unaccounted for—the caulking!” She is clearly informed by creative expression; there are several references throughout to art, music, and film. In the preface, she mentions the film, July Rain, about people experiencing “a period of revision of the positions already developed earlier” a process “associated with loss.” The film becomes a touchstone: “a score of the recent events of my life charted for me in brushstrokes the size of trees.”

As Eliza travels from specialist to specialist, we learn the tragedy of her diagnosis: “Sudden Deafness. The term sounded so severe that it verged on comedic for the wingspan of one moment … I had lost low-end hearing … there was no explanation for the cause.” For the doctors, she’s “a person of interest … specialists, researchers in the field … made specific room in their schedules to see me.” But none are helpful in providing a path forward; one suggests she could be experiencing “the onset of a degenerative hearing disease that typically affects people late in life, and concludes in a profound deafness. The sincerest strain of quiet.”

As the story spins out, we learn her apartment is owned by a painter, a woman who suggests that one should always have duplicates. The courtyard of the apartment building was featured in Hitchock’s Rear Window, and a replica still exists on a Hollywood lot. Later, when Eliza travels to Los Angeles for an experimental treatment, she remembers the replica of her apartment. There is a temporariness in her life that existed even before her hearing loss which adds to the ongoing anxiety in the text. Reflecting on the increasing silence in her life, she acknowledges that “My voice would always be the one thing I could hear, even if everything else had been shut out.” Referring back to the idea of duality, of replicas, she mentions Husserl’s proposition that “even in the instant when we speak to ourselves silently, there must be something like a tiny rip that divides us into the speaker and the hearer. This rip somehow separates you from yourself in the moment of hearing yourself speak.” In LA, she feels “like a duplicate of [her]self” and when she returns to New York, she thinks she might find herself already there.

As time passes, she learns what most people with chronic illness learn: that “When something becomes constant it stops being urgent,” and people disappear from her life. Her mother puts her in touch with a friend who once knew John Cage. Together, they discuss his piece 4’33” which debuted years before but on the same date Eliza lost her hearing. There are connections, synchronicities like this throughout the novel, and the reader is left to decide if they’re important or just one of the ways Eliza is trying to find meaning in a life that has suddenly become nonsensical. For Cage, the friend says, silence was only “a state of mind—a question of intention and non-intention … silence is nothing but the things we choose to ignore and exclude.” For Eliza, silence has become the center of her world. Moments of realization and loss are sharpened with comments like, “By this time, no voice was familiar, but I could distinguish them by the rhythm of a sentence.” For her, silence isn’t merely a state of mind—she has to wear “ear coverings used around power tools—to control the quiet.” Her anxiety is palpable as she tracks her daily movements, phone calls, and medications, and notes, “Now I was making a score by keeping score.” She acknowledges that her growing fear is “losing the variations of silence” and, although she doesn’t say it, the choice between hearing and silence. This is a deeply moving meditation on life and loss—a stunning debut.