A composer facing hearing loss turns to self and art
IN HER BRILLIANT AUTOFICTIONAL DEBUT Eliza Barry Callahan follows a film composer in her late twenties struck with progressive hearing loss. The narrator, who remains unnamed until the last page, awakens one morning to a deep droning in her right ear. Accompanied by “a perpetually rolling thunder”, it distorts the bark of the little black dog with whom she shares her New York apartment.
She is diagnosed with sudden deafness (cause unclear): “the term sounded so severe that it verged on comedic for the wingspan of one moment”. Appointments with specialists follow; one gives a prognosis of profound deafness. Yet, although “silence is dressed as an injury”, it allows the narrator to engage with the inner workings of her mind: “I could hear my voice more clearly now, and even when I wasn’t speaking my thoughts felt somehow louder. I had become nearer to myself”.
As friends drift away and her circumference narrows, the narrator looks to art to make sense of her experience. She also turns to online hearingloss forums, where users report hearing the same phantom songs, including “Silent Night”. She finds solace in The Buzzer, a radio station that broadcasts buzzing with occasional snippets of speech, taking comfort in the fact that other listeners are also “waiting for words to erupt from the waves like little bombs”. Despite the impact of the condition on her livelihood she displays an admirable lack of self-pity: she commits to writing down “the stark, inescapable facts of a situation” and peppers her observations with wry humour.
An artist, film-maker and musician, Callahan is half of the indie duo Purr. Their second album, Who Is Afraid of Blue (2023), named after a painting by Barnett Newman, is “lightly in conversation” with The Hearing Test, we learn from the record label’s description. Not unlike Newman’s monochromes, Callahan’s sentences are “simple, but produce a whole register of feelings”. A doctor advises the narrator to abstain from “anything that might give way to heightened emotions”. The coolness of her prose is not the same as the affectlessness currently in vogue, however. Instead its reined-in sentiment allows the reader’s emotions to rise in response.
“Novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex”, wrote Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Cou
