Role Play
Isabel Waidner, As If
Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780241779187
reviewed by Victoria Mangan
If you were to outline a Waidnerian aesthetic, on the strength of their last four books, it might go like this: a fearless cannibalism of existing texts, TV shows, animated films, novels, you name it; what Waidner themself identified in 2019 as a ‘disidentificatory’ practice vis à vis the existing canon of avant-garde literature; a thoroughgoing engagement with the actual class and racial politics of this grim little island, rather than the ones we tell ourselves we have; slightly mind-bending events that make sense on the page but are, in the physical universe, a little harder to understand; and, since being picked up by Penguin, a Day-Glo aesthetic to the actual books that does, at least for me, sometimes bleed through to the texts as you read them. But you’d be making a mistake, because As If, Waidner’s fifth novel, has very few of these characteristics.
There are no leopards hiding in the walls (We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff), no eight-legged deer (Corey Fah Does Social Mobility), no restagings of Kafka’s The Trial (Sterling Karat Gold). Instead Waidner turns with their fifth novel to something you could call Dostoevskian, or maybe Gogolesque. As If is about two men who look the same. Aubrey Lewis, a washed-up actor whose wife has died of cancer, is in the Barbican underpass when he passes another man who is sitting on the ground. This is Lindsey Korine, who we learn has walked out on his cancer-survivor wife and child. Korine follows Lewis home and the two discover that each of them is the other’s road not travelled.
Following a slew of award wins, worked out and problematised in their subsequent books, Waidner is one of the best-known experimentalists in contemporary Britain. Their earlier novels give the impression that anything could happen at any moment, that every chapter might be a new experiment; As If feels like one longer experiment, which is not to say that it is slower or less exciting than the others. In this it reminds me less of BS Johnson, with whom Waidner has previously grappled on the page, than his contemporary and friend Ann Quin. There’s more than a shade of Berg about As If: in the page-long paragraphs that, like skyscrapers divided up for housing, are made of much smaller sentence units; in its play of doubles and triples; and especially in one protagonist playing house with the other’s lover. Both novels, too, have a stylistic debt to Beckett and the nouveau roman, and As If takes its epigraph from Beckett’s Molloy. But while the book’s title seems to invite comparison — ‘it’s as if Beckett or Quin wrote a novel about…’ — it is also an exclamation, a statement of defiant unlikeliness. So enough of what it’s like or not like, more of what it is.
Starting with Lewis, an actor who you might unkindly call ‘washed-up’: totally knocked sideways by the death of his wife from cancer, after a career he pursued with single-minded dedication has collapsed. A working-class kid who first realised he, too, could be an actor after seeing Gary Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears, Lewis spent his youth memorising monologues, eventually grinding his way into a well-received Godot (‘my first-ever production was a four-week run at the Barbican, I used to tell people that’). It all went to hell when, in his next big role, he thought he heard someone in the audience say he wasn’t ‘doing it right’. Describing these events, he calls it the ‘first step that would land him, well, in the tracksuit’. The tracksuit is what he put on after 17 years in a bit part on a surrealist sitcom called People Live, People Die, People Live as if They Were Already Dead; the tracksuit is what he settled into when his wife died. The tracksuit is the grief he can’t step out of even when a director comes knocking with the lead role in a juicy prime-time reboot, As If. The tracksuit indexes working-class disposability in the arts, attends to the feeling of being used up and thrown away. It moved me a great deal, and so did Lewis’ memory of a bad joke he made to his wife while waiting for her biopsy results: ‘I have to live with that now.’
Korine, on the other hand, saw that same production of Prick Up Your Ears and realised it would never, could never be for him, that ‘Oldman made it in spite of his schooling, not because of it’. Better, he thought then, never to try than to try and fail. Korine keeps pretty schtum about his own background, fitting odd hints in the gaps of Lewis’ narrative, but it’s him who first decides to step into the other man’s shoes, leaving behind his wife in remission and their child.
Writing two characters who look the same is a more bravado move than it sounds, because on the page everyone looks the same. They’re not actors duplicated by judicious editing; they’re all made of words. Waidner makes careful choices here. ‘Were we ever to be seen together,’ Lewis thinks, ‘we would reflect badly on each other’. Korine tries to dodge the question, averring that ‘he didn’t not look like me’. But, remembering that the two were at school together, he has already conceded: Lewis was ‘more himself than I’d ever be’. Some confusion of pronouns, by this point, is natural. Both men narrate, so each is ‘I', except when the other sees them, and voice has to be what differentiates them for the reader. At the outset of the novel, Lewis explains himself carefully, while Korine floods the page with thoughts, clarifying and revising himself without stopping to think. But then each begins to take over the other’s life, and the line begins to blur. ‘Who was she to me,’ wonders Korine, meeting a colleague of Lewis’ on set after winning a role in his name; ‘he hadn’t been sleeping in his own bed since I left,’ says Lewis of Korine’s kid, who he’s now parenting. A great deal of the pleasure in reading As If comes from observing the delicate web Waidner spins with language, their careful attention to how one can slide into another’s life, first in person and then on the page.
Not that there isn’t fun to be had. People Live, People Die and its cast of initialed characters, all called Smith, is a typically Waidnerian piece of invention, with the prosthetic nose irritating Lewis’ skin and putting Gogol to work. Whether Korine’s description of the prestige miniseries reboot as ‘realism-by-default in keeping with the literary zeitgeist’ in this, Waidner’s most small-r realist novel, is self-deprecating, I couldn’t possibly say. But it did make me snort. Other times the comedy is wrapped around a gut punch; when Lewis finds out that Korine’s wife isn’t visually identical to the wife he himself lost, I smiled — why would you think that? — but realised that I had thought she would be too. We’d both tricked ourselves into the tracksuit for second, thinking that there was no escape from the narrative that had already been written out for him to act in.
Indeed, it’s theatre that gives As If its most potent metaphors, which circulate throughout the text in the mouths (or, on the keyboards) of both men. Because, you see, they’re both playing roles: one another. The novel’s opening certainly resembles two monologues, a two-hander perhaps, but as it develops it’s more like the two main characters have walked out of the black box and into the street without abandoning their roles. Lewis confesses to approaching Korine’s life as a ‘high-stakes acting role’, and expresses his frustration that Korine’s wife acknowledges that he’s not really her husband, announcing ‘to hypothetical theatregoers that someone, I, was acting’. Korine, meanwhile, realises that he’s not just playing a character in As If with no acting experience, he’s also playing the actor. 'As if that weren’t enough,’ he writes, ‘my portrayal of an experienced actor had to convince a large number of experienced actors and crew on set.’ There’s layers to this. But Lewis has it best, figuring out pretty early the extent to which this is true of everyone, we’re all playing roles: ‘I was navigating a set of conditions which, taken together, amounted to Korine’s life and produced Korine-like responses’. The tracksuit, after all, might be just a costume that you can take off the way you rip off a prosthetic nose.
Is that true? If it were that easy, if you could just doff the tracksuit and get on with it, I suspect we’d all have fewer problems, and vastly fewer novels. While As If is never programmatic — it is a narrative and not a manifesto — Waidner is not without hope. Just as As If exceeds its initial formal constraints, Korine and Lewis can exceed the narrative they thought they’d been written into. There is a life outside of the costume, a role that’s not been written. It’s hard to find but it’s there.
There are no leopards hiding in the walls (We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff), no eight-legged deer (Corey Fah Does Social Mobility), no restagings of Kafka’s The Trial (Sterling Karat Gold). Instead Waidner turns with their fifth novel to something you could call Dostoevskian, or maybe Gogolesque. As If is about two men who look the same. Aubrey Lewis, a washed-up actor whose wife has died of cancer, is in the Barbican underpass when he passes another man who is sitting on the ground. This is Lindsey Korine, who we learn has walked out on his cancer-survivor wife and child. Korine follows Lewis home and the two discover that each of them is the other’s road not travelled.
Following a slew of award wins, worked out and problematised in their subsequent books, Waidner is one of the best-known experimentalists in contemporary Britain. Their earlier novels give the impression that anything could happen at any moment, that every chapter might be a new experiment; As If feels like one longer experiment, which is not to say that it is slower or less exciting than the others. In this it reminds me less of BS Johnson, with whom Waidner has previously grappled on the page, than his contemporary and friend Ann Quin. There’s more than a shade of Berg about As If: in the page-long paragraphs that, like skyscrapers divided up for housing, are made of much smaller sentence units; in its play of doubles and triples; and especially in one protagonist playing house with the other’s lover. Both novels, too, have a stylistic debt to Beckett and the nouveau roman, and As If takes its epigraph from Beckett’s Molloy. But while the book’s title seems to invite comparison — ‘it’s as if Beckett or Quin wrote a novel about…’ — it is also an exclamation, a statement of defiant unlikeliness. So enough of what it’s like or not like, more of what it is.
Starting with Lewis, an actor who you might unkindly call ‘washed-up’: totally knocked sideways by the death of his wife from cancer, after a career he pursued with single-minded dedication has collapsed. A working-class kid who first realised he, too, could be an actor after seeing Gary Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears, Lewis spent his youth memorising monologues, eventually grinding his way into a well-received Godot (‘my first-ever production was a four-week run at the Barbican, I used to tell people that’). It all went to hell when, in his next big role, he thought he heard someone in the audience say he wasn’t ‘doing it right’. Describing these events, he calls it the ‘first step that would land him, well, in the tracksuit’. The tracksuit is what he put on after 17 years in a bit part on a surrealist sitcom called People Live, People Die, People Live as if They Were Already Dead; the tracksuit is what he settled into when his wife died. The tracksuit is the grief he can’t step out of even when a director comes knocking with the lead role in a juicy prime-time reboot, As If. The tracksuit indexes working-class disposability in the arts, attends to the feeling of being used up and thrown away. It moved me a great deal, and so did Lewis’ memory of a bad joke he made to his wife while waiting for her biopsy results: ‘I have to live with that now.’
Korine, on the other hand, saw that same production of Prick Up Your Ears and realised it would never, could never be for him, that ‘Oldman made it in spite of his schooling, not because of it’. Better, he thought then, never to try than to try and fail. Korine keeps pretty schtum about his own background, fitting odd hints in the gaps of Lewis’ narrative, but it’s him who first decides to step into the other man’s shoes, leaving behind his wife in remission and their child.
Writing two characters who look the same is a more bravado move than it sounds, because on the page everyone looks the same. They’re not actors duplicated by judicious editing; they’re all made of words. Waidner makes careful choices here. ‘Were we ever to be seen together,’ Lewis thinks, ‘we would reflect badly on each other’. Korine tries to dodge the question, averring that ‘he didn’t not look like me’. But, remembering that the two were at school together, he has already conceded: Lewis was ‘more himself than I’d ever be’. Some confusion of pronouns, by this point, is natural. Both men narrate, so each is ‘I', except when the other sees them, and voice has to be what differentiates them for the reader. At the outset of the novel, Lewis explains himself carefully, while Korine floods the page with thoughts, clarifying and revising himself without stopping to think. But then each begins to take over the other’s life, and the line begins to blur. ‘Who was she to me,’ wonders Korine, meeting a colleague of Lewis’ on set after winning a role in his name; ‘he hadn’t been sleeping in his own bed since I left,’ says Lewis of Korine’s kid, who he’s now parenting. A great deal of the pleasure in reading As If comes from observing the delicate web Waidner spins with language, their careful attention to how one can slide into another’s life, first in person and then on the page.
Not that there isn’t fun to be had. People Live, People Die and its cast of initialed characters, all called Smith, is a typically Waidnerian piece of invention, with the prosthetic nose irritating Lewis’ skin and putting Gogol to work. Whether Korine’s description of the prestige miniseries reboot as ‘realism-by-default in keeping with the literary zeitgeist’ in this, Waidner’s most small-r realist novel, is self-deprecating, I couldn’t possibly say. But it did make me snort. Other times the comedy is wrapped around a gut punch; when Lewis finds out that Korine’s wife isn’t visually identical to the wife he himself lost, I smiled — why would you think that? — but realised that I had thought she would be too. We’d both tricked ourselves into the tracksuit for second, thinking that there was no escape from the narrative that had already been written out for him to act in.
Indeed, it’s theatre that gives As If its most potent metaphors, which circulate throughout the text in the mouths (or, on the keyboards) of both men. Because, you see, they’re both playing roles: one another. The novel’s opening certainly resembles two monologues, a two-hander perhaps, but as it develops it’s more like the two main characters have walked out of the black box and into the street without abandoning their roles. Lewis confesses to approaching Korine’s life as a ‘high-stakes acting role’, and expresses his frustration that Korine’s wife acknowledges that he’s not really her husband, announcing ‘to hypothetical theatregoers that someone, I, was acting’. Korine, meanwhile, realises that he’s not just playing a character in As If with no acting experience, he’s also playing the actor. 'As if that weren’t enough,’ he writes, ‘my portrayal of an experienced actor had to convince a large number of experienced actors and crew on set.’ There’s layers to this. But Lewis has it best, figuring out pretty early the extent to which this is true of everyone, we’re all playing roles: ‘I was navigating a set of conditions which, taken together, amounted to Korine’s life and produced Korine-like responses’. The tracksuit, after all, might be just a costume that you can take off the way you rip off a prosthetic nose.
Is that true? If it were that easy, if you could just doff the tracksuit and get on with it, I suspect we’d all have fewer problems, and vastly fewer novels. While As If is never programmatic — it is a narrative and not a manifesto — Waidner is not without hope. Just as As If exceeds its initial formal constraints, Korine and Lewis can exceed the narrative they thought they’d been written into. There is a life outside of the costume, a role that’s not been written. It’s hard to find but it’s there.