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.... Husband who lost his wife and subsequently himself"--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, on the cusp of no-showing an audition. 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. Cold, he helps himself to two coats off the rack in the apartment. The coats belong not to Lewis but to the sublessor. Both men are marked by absences: of possessions, of self-worth. Discovering that Lewis intends to skip his audition, Korine decides to attend: for moral support, he thinks, and then to stand in. Korine, 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.
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). As the story unfolds, in dual narratives, Korine-as-Lewis struggles on the set of a new television show: not only must he play the assigned character (whose name he confuses with that of his abandoned son), but for his colleagues' benefit, he must play Lewis as well. And Lewis cares for the child (whose name he confuses with a character he was asked to play for television). But the men are so concerned with each other's lives that they will jeopardize their own.
The twisty plot of As If echoes the television show that made Lewis's career, in which "one sleuth, A. Smythe... was hired to keep watch on another sleuth, B. Smith, who was in turn hired to keep watch on A. Smythe. Unbeknownst to each other, neither Smythe nor Smith do anything other than observe each other, creating an existential feedback loop." Both anxiety-ridden, first-person voices emphasize the men's troubled states of mind, with short, staccato phrasing and abrupt punctuation: "Why not. Where was he." The effect is an unsettling novel of doubles, failures, missed and second chances: ghostly, cerebral, and unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: This surreal, unsettling doppelgänger story considers questions of identity, grief, and whether acting may be a route to reality.