Isabel Waidner’s As If is a daring doppelganger puzzle

Isabel Waidner’s four previous novels, from Gaudy Bauble (2017) to Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023), took the form of frenzied escapades that drew voltage from clashing registers. Among that cycle, Sterling Karat Gold (2021) centred on a non-binary migrant cleaner who is unjustly put on trial, the plot blending Iraqi history, a time-travelling spaceship, London’s performance art scene and the life of the German footballer Franz Beckenbauer, re-imagined with alarming irreverence.

Marrying the alienated mood of European modernism with the prose techniques of 1980s San Francisco experimentalists such as Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy, Waidner’s surrealism was all the more startling for being grounded in the sort of everyday normality ignored by orthodox literary fiction. When the protagonist of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) uses a top-up key to pay for electricity, it’s a reminder of just how ethereally middle-class most novels tend to be.

Waidner’s breakthrough came after winning the Goldsmiths prize in 2021: the self-described “awkwardgarde” DIY novelist, first published by the print-on-demand Manchester micro-press Dostoyevsky Wannabe, now has Sally Rooney’s agent and a deal with the Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton. If that hard-won prestige weighed heavily on Corey Fah Does Social Mobility – mark the title – Waidner’s new novel returns to form by audaciously turning away from the style that made their name. A taut psychological puzzler forged out of the fevered thoughts of two lookalike strangers who become dizzyingly entangled in one another’s life, As If leaves behind antic cartwheeling – no UFOs or repurposed celebrity biographies – for suspense and ambiguity.

It begins with Aubrey Lewis, an actor in freefall after his wife’s death from cancer, eking out his savings in a chilly Clerkenwell sublet. An ex-security guard, Lindsey Korine, abruptly turns up in his living room, having just walked out on his wife and son. Amid the halting yet oddly relaxed encounter that ensues, Lewis walks out in turn, leaving Korine to impersonate him at a casting call. While he lands the part, Korine’s wife, whose cancer is in remission, stumbles upon Lewis sleeping rough. “I decided not to question Korine’s wife’s hospitality,” he thinks, when she takes him back to her flat she shares with her young son. “If there had been a mistake, I’d rectify it in the morning.”

As each man impersonates the other – The Comedy of Errors by way of Samuel Beckett – Waidner wrings no little intrigue from the doppelganger conceit, keeping in play a wide range of interpretive possibilities, from grief-fuelled derangement to a non-realist dramatisation of divided selfhood. Yet however suggestive the novel’s symbolic substrate, Waidner takes care to fix our attention on more pressingly ticklish practicalities: neither Lewis-as-Korine nor Korine-as-Lewis care to be rumbled, and their pretence only grows knottier once we recognise that Korine’s wife has her own reasons for playing along.

It put me in mind of Katie Kitamura’s Booker-shortlisted Audition, another daringly experimental novel about acting and domestic role play, but As If has a keener sense of humour, alert to bathos as well as pathos. In particular, Waidner has the useful knack of knowing how to be pithy about their philosophical preoccupation with the slipperiness of identity. “You do you,” one man tells the other during a key encounter: “I mean, me.” There’s a winning lightness, too, to how Waidner skirts potential plot holes: “Password on a Post-it note on the wall, not a problem,” they add, when Korine uses Lewis’s laptop, as if to pre-empt readerly quibbling.

At the same time, the novel feels calculatedly aloof, the emancipatory glee of Waidner’s past work giving way to a more subterranean drama shaped by psychic contortions of dissimulation and masquerade. The story hurtles to a nervy finish – there’s a knife – but the real action is in the mind. “Korine wasn’t after his wife nor child. He was after me,” Lewis thinks. “Question was, what did he want from me. Who, for that matter, did I mean by ‘me’–.” Waidner cuts him off, as though to continue the sentence would be impossible.

As If by Isabel Waidner is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Suzie Howell