As If, Isabel Waidner's fifth novel, features two lookalike strangers who, after a chance meeting, with no spoken agreement, exchange lives. With notes of Stranger on a Train (minus the murders), their mutual obsession threatens both men's tenuous, borrowed realities.
In alternating first-person narratives, readers encounter Aubrey Lewis--"former actor whose career has come to nothing"--at the point where Lindsey Korine enters Lewis's dumpy sublet apartment in central London. Following the losses of both work and wife Laurie (to cancer), Lewis is moldering away. Korine follows him home and lets himself in, drawn to their physical sameness. He's been sleeping rough after walking out on his wife and young child. Discovering that Lewis intends to skip an upcoming audition, Korine decides to attend, and as Lewis, gets the job. Lewis walks out of the apartment and disappears. Korine, with no background or training, seizes the acting opportunity with surprising zeal. While Lewis is camped under the same bridge that his counterpart once used, Korine's wife and son happen by. They call him by the other man's name and take him home.
As the story unfolds, in dual narratives, Korine-as-Lewis struggles on the set of a new television show. Korine's wife, also named Laurie, has recently recovered from cancer treatment. Lewis is enlivened by the chance to care for Korine's son (he and the late Laurie had wanted maybe one day to have a child). Both anxiety-ridden, first-person voices emphasize the men's troubled states of mind, with short, staccato phrasing and abrupt punctuation. The effect is an unsettling novel of doubles, failures, missed and second chances: ghostly, cerebral, and unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia