“There is more to acting than just pretending to be somebody else,” remarks Lindsey Korine, one of the narrators of Isabel Waidner’s semi-absurdist fifth novel, As If. The narrative centres on the suspicious similarity of two men who end up (figuratively speaking) in each other’s shoes, trying – and failing – to pull off plausible performances of the other.
At the outset, Korine has walked out on his wife and son into the dreary sublet of Aubrey Lewis. Lewis is an out-of-work actor grieving the loss of his wife to cancer. Both men are tall and lanky, with dark-brown hair (though Lewis notes that Korine is “taller”, “lankier” and “younger-looking”). Both have been married to women named Laurie and both, to varying degrees, harboured ambitions of becoming actors in their childhood.
Lewis’s drive and instinctive talent have been leached out of him from years of working on a farcical yet fairly uninspiring BBC soap opera about two sleuths, A Smythe and B Smith, who are hired to keep watch on each other. Meanwhile, Korine recalls experiencing a desire to take up acting at the age of 11, then quickly casting the precarious vocation aside as “a fool’s errand” for someone of his class background.
Lewis has been asked to audition for a leading part in a spin-off of the soap opera – a show called As If, whose premise is not dissimilar from the premise of its predecessor (“but, in the-last-shall-be-the-first-the-first-last sort of biblical or Fanonian inversion”, “the original supporting cast” “elevated to leads and, vice versa”, and the genre, “realism-by-default in keeping with the literary zeitgeist”).
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He, however, has no intention of attending the audition, and is perturbed by how comfortably his newly arrived doppelganger occupies his borrowed home. The plot is set in motion when, sufficiently irked by Korine’s presence, Lewis walks out, leaving Korine behind in the flat to fully inhabit his life. Korine decides to attend the audition on Lewis’s behalf, secures the part with the encouragement of the director, but runs into the issue of concurrently playing his character in As If, and Lewis, once the shooting begins. Lewis, meanwhile, winds up at Korine’s flat, taking up the duties of husband and father that Korine has left behind.
Waidner draws on Beckett’s Molloy, from which As If’s epigraph is taken, for some devices and themes: two narrators who, as the narrative progresses, begin to mirror one another; a sleuth being given the absurdist task of tracking down a person who may turn out to be a version of himself.
Waidner further bequeaths Molloy’s crippled leg and coat (here doubled) to Korine and occasionally borrows Beckett’s tricksy grammar of reordered clauses (“This was the moment Korine chose to put in an appearance, I judged him on that,” says Lewis. “With people who took this liberty I had no patience,” says Molloy’s Moran).
But where Molloy exemplifies Beckett’s mastery in conjuring and sustaining a narrative voice, even as that voice disintegrates, As If opens in the register of its narrators’ inner monologues before abandoning the idiosyncrasies of their voice(s) to convey the plot in a more straightforward way. At times, the novel veers into outright explication of its concept, leaving behind Beckett’s syntactic/linguistic influence to adopt a more mechanistic mode.
Nevertheless, 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.
By its end, the novel’s title comes to offer two interlocking ways to read the story. On the one hand we have the “as if” that denotes approximation, and on the other we have the “as if (!)” that denotes incredulous doubt. In the first reading of the phrase, Lewis and Korine are simply trying to be the other, the “as if” inevitably concluding in a “not quite”.
The second reading, however, points to the impossibility of two such similar men existing independently of one another. Taking both interpretations together (“integrating” them, let’s say), As If 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.
