As If by Isabel Waidner

Compellingly written but also so set on not being too weird — or, perhaps, in being decidedly ambiguous — that it feels oddly unsatisfying, especially to a genre enthusiast like myself.

Aubrey Lewis is a forty-six year-old actor who’s sunk into a depression following the death of his wife Laurie. He subleases an apartment filled with someone else’s things, and listlessly considers getting back into acting again, following a chance meeting with a former co-worker who thinks he’d be great for a reboot she’s been working on.

When Lindsey Korine walks into Lewis’ apartment and starts making himself at home, Lewis doesn’t even dispute the other man’s right to be there. Korine has just walked out on his own wife Laurie, who survived the disease that killed Lewis’ spouse. Korine has never had much of a career, but he’s interested in acting. The two men are physically alike enough that when Korine decides to take Lewis’ spot at the audition, no one seems to notice the difference.

Lewis, meanwhile, has been co-opted by the living Laurie to take Korine’s place, for the benefit of their son. The more he gets comfortable playing the part of Korine, the less he wants to go back to his old life. As the two men gradually begin to confront the results of their choices, they begin to wonder whether the road not taken was the road they should have been on all along, and what they should do about it now that they have.

There are lots of ways to interpret Isabel Waidner’s latest novel: as a sliding doors narrative, as a psychotic break, as the admittedly less plausible tale of two separate men having a weirdly synced middle-age crisis. What this book ultimately is about, however, is performance, as Lewis and Korine fall more in love with acting a role than actually living. It is easier for Lewis, for example, to play the role of the missing Korine, in relation to his abandoned wife and child, than to actually decide to be a husband and father. When Laurie tries to bring up the fact that he’s not actually Korine despite her otherwise tacit acceptance of his role in her family’s life, Lewis gets annoyed at her for breaking the fourth wall.

Similarly, Korine is so obsessed with impersonating Lewis that he eventually lets go of any other interest or occupation, despite his initial success at auditioning in Lewis’ stead. As the two separate narratives that the men have built begin to collapse, so too do the book’s attempts at realism. The way that this affects readers will likely depend on their own literary preferences. If you love Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (which is constantly referenced here) and Paul Auster, then you’ll likely love this as a deliberately absurdist piece. If, however, you prefer the more warmblooded works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges and, arguably, David Mitchell, then you’ll likely leave wanting more.

Regardless of which camp you fall into, there’s no denying the power of Mx Waidner’s prose. While I often found myself irritated by the plot, I felt compelled to keep reading because of their excellent writing. I did feel like there were inside baseball references that I ought to have known in order to understand the book better: for example, smarter people than me have mentioned the significance of Sanford Meisner, the acting coach whom the character Sandy M was presumably based on, and his “as, if” theory of acting. Perhaps if I were more familiar with such relatively obscure topics — obscure even for me, a long-time trivia enthusiast and former professional actor — I would have enjoyed this more. As it stands, I was baffled by the meaning but admiring of the language. I’ve read far worse.

As If by Isabel Waidner was published June 16 2026 by FSG Originals and is available from all good booksellers, including