With a title that sounds like a mean girl turning down a nerd in a ’90s sitcom, Isabel Waidner’s third novel signals a similar rejecting attitude toward the reader’s expectations. Following 2023’s gloriously madcap Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, As If, brings captivating absurdity to the question of whether people are really more like actors performing their own lives, and explodes the idea that we all have a singular, natural self.
As If follows two similar-looking men, Aubrey Lewis and Lindsey Korine. Lewis is an actor who has become a recluse after his wife passed away; Korine is a deadbeat who walked out on his family. One day, Korine follows Lewis to his apartment, and, hearing about an audition Lewis is planning to skip, Korine decides to audition in his place. Soon they each step into the other’s life, like understudies taking over a role.
As in a Rorschach test, two mirror images, Lewis and Korine, are reflected back at each other in impressionistic blots. For every detail in one’s life, there is an equal and opposite detail in the other’s. This brilliant and engaging device lets readers track just how obverse these two are, and raises the question, “Are they the same person?” Many signs point to no, but the tension of whether they could be continues throughout the novel. When Korine takes over Lewis’ acting career, the layers of who is acting as whom compound—showing how much of human existence is really performance.
Waidner references Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot (Lewis even once acted as Vladimir in a production of the tragicomic masterpiece). But rather than awaiting God, Waidner has these two men waiting for each other, with great uncertainty. Like an actor, Waidner has a sharp sense for how each motion of the body and face has a meaning, something difficult for prose to capture. This quality is reminiscent of books like Edmund White’s Forgetting Elena, where a preternatural sense for manners and gestures shows how we rely on these almost imperceptible signals to make our way through social situations. There is an existential trickiness to acting “normally” among other people, and Waidner makes this endlessly complex game into an entertaining and stirring novel.
Elevating their signature screwball style to existential heights, As If solidifies Waidner as a contemporary master of the novel. As If is a heady, humorous and deeply human read.