The Hearing Test - by Eliza Barry Callahan

About the Book

"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 specter 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, ... making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival"--

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award
Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick

A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy

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 specter 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 neighbors, 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.

Review Quotes

Finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award
Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, The Telegraph, & Chicago Review of Books
Nylon, A Must-Read Book of the Month
Bookshop, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
Goodreads, A Most Anticipated Debut
The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"Over the course of a year in New York City, an artist goes deaf. She records her life as her hearing slips away, reflecting on silence, art, and record-keeping itself in this meditative novel." --The New York Times Book Review

"This engrossing, eccentric novel ties together our ideas about time and sensation, revealing how illness alters both. Then it untangles that knot and weaves a linguistic fabric unlike any you're likely to have felt before." --Emmeline Clein, The Atlantic

"Excellent . . . In this ambitious yet compact book, we continue to occupy the slippery ground between mimesis and anti-mimesis--the place where life imitates art and vice versa." --Kate Simpson, The Telegraph

"[The Hearing Test] has a loosely structured feel, often to delightful effect. There are numerous brilliant scenes of the narrator navigating her new life." --John Self, The Guardian

"[The Hearing Test] made me look differently at what we call the mundane and ordinary and all that slips through to be lost when we mark it as unimportant . . . Callahan's debut is refreshing and recommended for anyone navigating their own period of crisis and feeling unmoored." --Aliza Rahman, The Daily Star

"A novel by turns wry and revelatory and taut . . . Replete with crystalline heightened moments." --Lou Ann Walker, The East Hampton Star

"In a way that echoes [Rachel] Cusk's writing, Eliza's descriptions and judgments about her surroundings throw her inner life into relief: they seem designed to direct attention to how her mind moves. Callahan also shares Cusk's flair for seeding strange and piquant details into the speech of her narrator's interlocutors . . . Heartbreak and hearing loss are either symbols for each other or paired expressions of something deeper: a fundamental out-of-tune-ness that is beguilingly present in Callahan's style . . . [B]reathtakingly crafted." --Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

"A pitch-shifting, wry-humored novel . . . Callahan's cool, all-encompassing prose brings comparisons to Clarice Lispector and Fleur Jaeggy. It's a work that lets you in on the frequencies of life we often tune out or obscure from sight." --Anna Cafolla, A Vogue Best Book of the Year

"Both meditative and deliciously funny . . . masterfully-observed." --Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

"Pitch-perfect . . . Callahan handles humor with a lightness of touch, both in form (at 176 pages, the book is slight) and sensibility (the prose is enviably precise), that good comic timing has. Think of Charlie Chaplin walking off into the distance, brokenhearted and twirling his cane . . . Callahan creates something bigger than a simple story of individual trauma--by relinquishing an easy sense of exceptionalism, Callahan achieves something here that you might call grace." --Hannah Regel, Jacobin

"[A] brilliant autofictional debut . . . Callahan's philosophical prose, reminiscent of Fleur Jaeggy and Clarice Lispector, exhibits a quality of attention increasingly rare in our screen-addled era." --Mia Levitan, The Times Literary Supplement

"The Hearing Test unfolds with the ease of a diary but has, on second and third readings, an artful shape. It is separated into four movements like a symphony, full of loops, repetitions, and motifs, yet at just over 150 pages it is a very short and very quiet symphony." --Joanna Biggs, The New York Review of Books

"The Hearing Test attempts to describe an experience for which it is difficult to find the words, sometimes literally . . . The result is successful and refreshing. At a time when isolation, illness, and difference are ever more present in the collective consciousness, we need narratives like this to set a precedent of literary attention and care." --Madeleine Wulfahrt, Cleveland Review of Books

"An original, extraordinarily vivid book that is as much about life, chance and falling out of love, as it is about sickness, The Hearing Test is an invigorating study of the beauty and possibilities of language and representation." --Holly Connolly, AnOther Magazine

"Callahan uses the narrator's sudden deafness--and the questions that abound from such a radical transformation in how she engages with the sensory world--to claw at the underbelly of experience, to investigate conscious life at the most basic of units . . . There's consistent humor, little bursts of observational wit . . . [and] transcendentally lucid prose." --Stuart Beal, Columbia Spectator

"In dreamlike, state-of-consciousness free-flowing prose, Eliza Barry Callahan's debut novel is unpredictable, warm, and artistic." --Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag

"Terrifying though it may be to have to realign your perception of life once you're losing control of one of the main ways you experience it, it can also be liberating. And, for that matter, mundane. Callahan captures all of these elements in this beautifully discursive novel, that traces the experiences of her autofictional alter ego as she navigates what it might mean to live a life that's muted in one way, but amplified in so many others." --Kristin Iversen, Just Circling Back

"The Hearing Test is a gift. It touches on many forms of art--visual art, dance, music, literature--and those who create it. It explores the ways in which relationships--parental, romantic, sexual, platonic--change according to time and circumstances. And it traces how sometimes not having all the answers can lead to journeys of greater understanding, by way of some surprising meanderings." --Norah Piehl, Bookreporter

"Callahan debuts a magnificent stream-of-consciousness narrative portraying a young New York City artist as her hearing deteriorates . . . A bracing immersion into the world of the senses." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[A] quietly electrifying debut . . . This is a special novel with a style reminiscent of Magda Szabó's The Door and whose commitment to making sense of everyday existence calls to mind Tom McCarthy's Remainder." --Booklist (starred review)

"[W]hirling 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 . . . Callahan's deft hand, bobbing and weaving down these many avenues of thought, suggests a promising confidence from a writer just getting started." --Nina Moses, The Rumpus

"A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch." --Kirkus Reviews

"Not for a while have I read a book by a writer new to me, and felt so much toward it so fast. The Hearing Test takes up fragility, sound and silence, solitude, the unknown, and the self in relation to others with a light, yet serious touch. I've found a new favorite." --Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

"Eerie and tender and utterly consuming, The Hearing Test has built an entirely new world from the materials of the one we know. It takes you to a restaurant called the void, Il Vuoto, and serves you its primal, beguiling sustenance: a nourishment of pauses, estrangement, and bewilderment. The voice here is wise and wry and wondering; in its fresh and faltering silences are frequencies I've never heard before. From the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to keep reading Eliza Barry Callahan forever." --Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams

About the Author

Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer, filmmaker, and musician from New York, NY. Her work has appeared in BOMB, frieze, The Drift and elsewhere. She co-wrote the short film BUST which premiered at Sundance in 2024. She is a New York Foundation for The Arts Fellow and she teaches at Columbia University. The Hearing Test is her first novel.