Two men meet in an apartment in London. They are strangers to one another, and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine has just walked out on his. Lewis is a retired actor whose career never amounted to much beyond a bit part on a B-list sitcom; Korine has always dreamed of acting. Slowly and then all at once, each begins to live on the other’s behalf. As Korine answers a casting call under Lewis's name, Lewis finds himself playing father to the other man’s son. Each day the strange ruse becomes truer and stranger, more entrenched. Plunged into an existential game of cat-and-mouse, pursuit and retreat, they find that acting might make it possible to, finally, live.
Grief is the engine of this surreal caper ... The novel’s alternating narrators keep things moving briskly, the limited perspective of one chapter delivering the comic payoff of the next ... Amid the dizzying back-and-forth, Waidner conceals a subtle exploration of midlife crisis.
Waidner’s tactic of switching selves...is wrenchingly funny and not a little poignant ... Waidner’s brand of anarchic dissonance and absurdist comic jolts buoy the novel along, even if the whole enterprise seems merely laughter in the dark.
Waidner’s craft is evident in the comically intricate layers of performance and mirroring that quickly accrete in the text; Korine and Lewis both mirror and perform each other, while the premise of the show, As If – itself adapted from a novel within the novel called … As If – begins to mirror the plot of the novel that we read ... Becomes a concise and clever take on Jung’s concept of the shadow self – a parable on the failure to accept one’s true desire, and to later find oneself haunted by the vestige of a former self.
