For years, as you got comfortable in your cushy recliner, overpriced and over-buttered popcorn in hand, ready for the feature film to begin, AMC would insert a quick infomercial with a soundwave of increasing noise—ringing phones, crying babies, whispers and laughter—that ended with the rejoinder, “Please don’t spoil the movie by adding your own soundtrack. Silence is golden.” Certainly we may crave other moviegoers to be silent, but in other contexts we fear the so-called “awkward silence,” desperate for the disruptions, the background noise, that AMC cautioned us against. Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test (2024) asks us to notice how and why we fill silence as its narrator must when she suddenly begins losing her hearing.
The Hearing Test is Callahan’s first novel, having previously published short stories and short films. In the novel, the first-person narrator—whose name is also Eliza—must reckon with a new reality after she wakes one morning with a sound like thunder ringing in her ears. Diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, and experiencing her hearing deteriorate, Eliza must reinvent how she understands herself as well as her senses.
Now, “said” initially may seem to convey a realism borne from transcription, but its relentless usage ends up calling attention to itself.
Throughout, the narrative continually returns to various methods of directing one’s attention: a log, a record, a frame, a forum. The preface prepares its readers to think about such processes for keeping track, explicitly musing on the word “score” in all of its many valences: “as a map or directive, a tally, a musical accompaniment […] a cut into a surface.” Simultaneously referring to what has been and what could be, a score recognizes the ways we have been marked and the ways we leave our mark on others. And in indicating past hurts, future destinations and present conditions all at once, it makes sense that Callahan presents score as a framework; the story to follow, the preface shares, is “how I kept score” of hearing loss. The narrator’s job composing scores for films assures that the concept of a record – as something set, as something listened to, as something acknowledged – remains on center stage throughout the text. Readers are poised to consider our own processes for registering what has happened and where we may go next, for interpreting the crescendos and diminuendos of our lives. And as the narrator catalogs her experience, a distinct pattern emerges: the repetition of the verb “said.” Forming the metronome of the novel, “said” reminds us that the dialogic lingers in and under our every encounter, our own being.
“Said” appears almost constantly throughout The Hearing Test. Consider this parade of examples from meetings with her doctor, hypnotherapist and a hearing specialist, respectively: “Never mind, he said. Do you remember? he said […] He said to keep a log”; “he said that if you turn your radio to 4625 Hz […] He said that these occurrences suggest the buzzing tones are not internally generated […] He said that last month several unusual broadcasts were observed.” “The specialist said this was just another phase. He said it was typical. He said there was a new trial in east Los Angeles at a private institute specific to ears. The facility was shaped like a seashell, he said, just like the spiraled pathways of the cochlea. He said, Isn’t that so Los Angeles.” If this pattern remained the purview of medical spaces, it might point to the stamp of medical authority that so often makes the practitioner seem the sole knowledge-maker and their patient a mere receptacle—a common critique in illness narratives. But Callahan does not make that choice.
Instead, “said” is attached to every person with whom the narrator comes in contact. When Eliza bumps into a neighbor in the hallway, readers learn that the neighbor “said her storage unit was just a mausoleum […] She said there is never only one of anything […[ She said that she was herself an actress […] She said with horror that she suspected this woman worked in marketing. She said that she gravitated toward people who had a hard time maintaining close relationships. She said she should like to keep a key.” Or, in another equally random run-in, her landlord “said that was too bad […] that most lives are lived on one long service road […] she preferred films without any score” and so on. Every encounter bears this marking. At one point, the narrator’s ex-boyfriend visits her new apartment and, for just a few examples, says: “that the texture of the walls reminded him of Italy,” “that it was perfect for one person,” “that my hair had gotten so long.” In other moments, whether we’re hearing from the ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend or a cab driver we meet just once, the narrator keeps score of what gets said.
Indeed, in a novel that is intent on theorizing sound and the lack thereof, Callahan emphasizes listening not as receptive background noise but a forceful act.
Now, “said” initially may seem to convey a realism borne from transcription, but its relentless usage ends up calling attention to itself. In one illuminating example, at an art gallery, the narrator records how a woman’s voice loudly intruded into the quiet space: “She said that she was so sorry. She said that she felt horrible. She said that she was so embarrassed […] And then another woman’s voice joined in and said not to worry. She said, Please don’t worry at all. She said, Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. She said, It’s not your fault at all. She said that it’s not anyone’s fault” (45-6). Interjecting “said” each time, the narrator not only emphasizes the speech act but also enforces a stilted quality to the narration. If, in the scene above, the narrative approaches the tone of a documentary, the wilful repetition of “said” intervenes in that effect, becoming noticeable, annoying, even comical. In so doing, “said” becomes a rhythm in the novel’s formal shape and a reflection on dialogue as the essential infrastructure of our daily lives. The novel insists that we are always saying—or, in other words, that we are always listening to something that someone else is saying.
Indeed, in a novel that is intent on theorizing sound and the lack thereof, Callahan emphasizes listening not as receptive background noise but a forceful act. Thrust into an increasingly shadowy environment, full of shades and silhouettes of familiar noises but less and less the entire substance of that noise, the narrator must reckon with our cultural consciousness of silence. At first perceived in the negative – as a sort of theft or even confession of guilt – and then as a negative – a certain emptiness – silence slowly transforms into a type of presence over the course of the novel. Turning to John Cage’s 4’33” or the low drone of radio station 4625 Hz, the narrator begins to wonder about what observations silence might make possible. And in Eliza’s ruminations over a comet as “one prolonged silence in the sky,” as in her research into Johannes Kepler which guides her to listen “to the song of the planets,” silence takes on a spatial quality, exerting a gravitational pull that we might resist but cannot outrun. Amid the narrator’s explicitly new ways of noticing the scores to which our lives have always already been set, the novel’s form introduces another: the give and take of he said, she said, they say, I say.
Importantly, the novel unravels ‘voice’ as a defining characteristic; the readers, like our narrator, must unsettle our assumptions about sound. As the narrator’s hearing deteriorates, she describes her difficulty making out others’ words. Soon enough, “no voice was familiar,” not even her mother’s (28). They all sound the same, she explains. But our voice is hardly entirely our own, anyway; the narrator recalls reaching out to the woman who reads New York City subway announcements and learning “she didn’t own her voice. She had sold it to a technology company” (107). Outside of such overtly capitalistic measures, our voices are always structured by those around us, by what we listen to, by what we integrate into our own thinking; what gets said filters into what we say. Indeed, the considerable space given to reporting other’s words, in addition to the narrator’s own words, helps us realize Eliza’s voice is in harmony with—in literal conversation with—a whole community of voices. Narrative, here, emerges only ever from the echoes of other narratives, of other narrators. As a result, the novel’s work to make apparent the force of how much we say—such that it becomes the forcefield under which we all structure our lives—becomes essential not in upholding a neoliberal idea of voice as exemplar of individual freedom but instead in unpacking voice as a collective engagement with one another.
Yet, as the narrator gets used to mishearing, she feels a certain agency in the act of misinterpreting, acknowledging that such moments “are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have” (54). If, as the novel suggests, dialogue forms the architecture of our everyday worlds, mistaking another’s meaning becomes a certain and highly creative way to construct our realities. And it is true that, although “he said…she said…” may read like a dependable documentation of time past, akin to a stenographer’s account, Callahan’s novel never clarifies if our narrator has misheard—even as this narrator affirms her frequent mishearings. If the novel imparts to us that our worlds are built on the pathways of what gets said, then it also even more subtly implies our own hand in paving those paths and their directions. When, what, and who we attune ourselves to forms the groundwork over which we trod. Think of the novel’s end, when Eliza wants to call out a warning to another version of herself, “But I knew she could not hear me” (159). The missed connection, the road not taken, may have made all the difference.
In a novel that wonders about the way a frame curates our attention and intentions, by the end, Eliza decides to stop keeping score. She reconceptualizes her “little black book filled with the days” of loss as “the record, the nonsense” (157). A record of non-sense, of sensory loss, her systems for tracking and logging evidently lose their appeal. But the discursive world persists. Whether (mis)transcribed into a book or not, the world will go on speaking. Notably, the narrator reminds us that losing sound does not mean losing language—these dialogues are never the sole property of the hearing. Every word said functions as one rung of the scaffolding that emerges most consistently in The Hearing Test: the endless series of conversations we are entering into, departing from, walking past, eavesdropping on. It turns out we’re all adding our own soundtrack. The trick is learning to listen.
Maggie Boyd earned her PhD in English Literature at Boston University in 2024 and now works as Assistant Director for Writing Support at BU. Her research focuses on contemporary representations of healing. She has perfected her Dunkin order and – though she is otherwise not much of a cook – the baked potato.