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 [Rachel] Cusk’s flair for seeding strange and piquant details into the speech of her narrator’s interlocutors ... Callahan’s synesthetic language troubles the distinctions between senses. Frequent ellipses represent sound trailing off ... Callahan toggles back and forth between the language of hearing and the language of vision, using them seemingly interchangeably. She suggests that silence has made Eliza a spectator to her life ... It is worth asking what sort of book Eliza is trying to write. She seems to have fallen into a contemporary trap of believing that a self-aware sentience on the page is sufficient to prompt an aesthetic impression in others ... Ultimately, Eliza’s observations add up to a character study, an illumination of Eliza via the types of things that she notices. This isn’t in itself a bad thing, but it makes the gestures toward themes of sensory deprivation feel tacked on. Likewise, the autofictional structure scans less as a comment on unreliable perceptions or constructed reality than as a way for Callahan to disown Eliza’s desire for self-display—or even to critique it. The resulting reading experience, which intertwines the validations of recognition and judgment, can offer a lot of pleasure, but on its own, in 2024, it is starting to yield diminishing returns.
Ms. Callahan muffles all this strangeness under layers of precise but affectless prose that is perhaps better suited at conveying boredom than fear and paranoia ... Even so, the altered state of inexplicable illness evoked in this novel is unsettling, and there are many moments when visions of the uncanny emerge from the fog.
