In Isabel Waidner’s previous novel, 2023’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a working-class writer wins a literary prize. As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah – an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system – is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its “unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity”.
In Waidner-world the surreal is always lurking, gleefully waiting to trip the reader up. As If uses the acting profession and its inherent themes of performance and doubleness to explore the precarity of work. A Waiting for Godot transported to the housing estates and grotty sublets of Clerkenwell, London, the book opens with a gnomic Vladimir/Estragon-type exchange between two startlingly similar strangers in a flat. They are both in their late 40s, very tall, dark-haired, a mirror image of each other – “my unremarkable eyes, they were looking back at me”, Aubrey Lewis, who is subletting the flat, notices with some alarm. “Were we ever to be seen together, I thought, we would reflect badly on each other.” The other man, dressed in “a novelty T-shirt, the less said of it the better, and pyjama bottoms”, had “walked in through the door as if he owned the place”. He introduces himself as Lindsey Korine and announces he is cold. Rifling, with Pinteresque fuss and deliberation, among the “historic arrangement” of heavy coats left by the previous subtenant, he assumes a new guise for his next role in the narrative.
