In Isabel Waidner’s fifth novel, As If, two nearly identical men encounter each other at possible turning points in their lives and offer one another a glimpse of what could have been if they’d made different choices. Just as they did with their excellent fourth novel, Corey Fah does Social Mobility (2023), in As If Waidner constructs absurd situations to point to the realities of working-class artists. While its predecessor ultimately gestures towards possibility, As If presents a more sober look at what it takes to fight your way from working-class to working artist—and why you should do it anyway.

Aubrey Lewis, one-time actor of stage and screen, sits alone in his unpacked sublet apartment, isolated by deep grief over the loss of his wife, Laurie, from cancer, and the end of his career. Two years on from both losses, Lewis’s savings are dwindling, which could be helped by a part he was just offered: a reprisal of the bit TV role he hated playing for the seventeen years he played it.

Enter Lindsey Korine, whose wife, also named Laurie, survived her cancer treatments and whom he then either left (as well as their son) or was kicked out by a few days prior to the start of the novel. Wet and sheltering below an underpass with nowhere to go, Korine spots Lewis, his doppelgänger, across the street, follows him home, and walks into Lewis’s apartment like he owns it.

In chapters that alternate points of view, we learn first about Lewis’s life and then Korine’s and the similarities between them that extend beyond being so close in appearance that they can effectively swap lives. Both attended the same secondary school, both watched Gary Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears, which inspired both to become actors; but only one of them went after that dream.

This shared biographical memory is the closest the novel comes to answering the question of whether Lewis and Korine are separate people or one man in the midst of a psychological crisis. For my money, it doesn’t matter. Like the speculative elements in Corey Fah, Waidner’s weird motifs may move the plot forward, but they are not the point of the stories. That said, the way Lewis and Korine remember watching Oldman gives us a “sliding doors” moment on which to hang our hats.

Here’s Lewis’s version:

I wasn’t your typical actor ... By which I mean, I come from a vastly different set of material circumstances compared to most actors I met in the industry over the decades. You’d think it doesn’t matter, but it does. It means that I come at it, acting, differently. I never even thought of it as something people did until I saw Gary Oldman play Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears one night on the BBC. I was ten or eleven. I was completely arrested. I’d heard that he, Oldman, went to the same secondary school in Deptford as I did, twenty years prior, which can’t have helped my subsequent overidentification with him. Seeing him on TV, I decided I would be an actor, too, but not tell anyone: growing up in New Cross, South East London, the only child to a single mother, the idea was so far removed from what was presented to me as reality it wasn’t funny and was possibly punishable, Oldman, or no Oldman. (p. 11)

Young Lewis knew the challenges but couldn’t deny the way acting made him feel. If you’ve read Corey Fah, you’ll recognize a repeated Waidner theme: without examples of people like you doing a thing, it’s that much more difficult to imagine yourself doing it. Representation matters.

And now Korine’s:

We all knew Oldman made it despite his schooling, not because of it. If anyone thought of having a go at acting at my school, they knew better than to seriously pursue it. A fool’s errand, despite Oldman’s one-in-a-million example, or even because of it: if he made it, the chances of another one making it had to be close to zero. (p. 37)

Korine then goes on to doubt his probability calculus, noting that it’s not his strong suit—though it might have been if he’d tried, which he didn’t. “None of us did ... Commonsensical not to participate in a losing game” (p. 37). Exceptions are nearly impossible to emulate.

One memory leads to another until Korine recalls an unusual kid in school who was always talking to himself on the playground, hair up in colorful elastics. Sitting in Lewis’s apartment, he figures it was Lewis, practicing parts. Korine remembers going up to the kid and asking him if he wanted to stop talking to himself and come play football with the other boys. “The kid was a fool, and yet, I admired him almost in spite of myself: he was more himself than I’d ever be, I knew it instinctively” (p. 38).

As cynical and passive as Korine comes across, he’s not wrong: Lewis worked terribly hard to get stage roles that could have catapulted him to fame had he the advantage of the kind of preparation more economically privileged actors received; Korine took the safer route. Like his father and most of the boys from school, he does menial work, but he eventually grows bored of each new job and leaves or is fired. Now, even his accomplishments—husband and father—don’t look like much to Korine. But they look like the life Lewis might have had if he hadn’t been so bloody-minded about his acting career.

Naturally, the two men switch lives. Korine goes to an audition for a revival of Lewis’s television role and lands the part. Meanwhile Lewis steps into the role of husband and father, Korine’s wife and child having accepted his presence even as they know that he is not, in fact, Korine. It goes alright for a while, but absurdity continues and inevitably they bail out of their imposter lives.

As other reviews have noted, mid-life crises, grief, and, to a lesser extent, gender, are thematic elements of As If, but Waidner’s keen eye is once again largely focused on the way social hierarchies limit the potential and opportunities of underprivileged artists.

Where Corey Fah centers a writer in the early stages of their publishing career, As If follows a mid-career actor ready to give up, and his mid-life doppelgänger who never even tried. Where Corey Fah worries over how to make the most of their fifteen minutes of fame, deciding in the end to “pay it forward” to a young would-be artist, Aubrey Lewis worries he’s spent his best years chasing a dream that was always already foreclosed; and Korine wonders what hope there is for guys like him if guys like Lewis fail.

In telling Korine about the height of his stage-acting career, the lead role in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner with the National Theatre, and the moment when he froze on stage, Lewis locates his downfall in social obstacles familiar to most working-class artists:

I didn’t have the consistency that derives from professionalism and craft, whatever they teach you in drama school. Vital lessons I had missed. A related issue: acting, the way I went about it, the only way I knew how to, came at a cost. I tended to overapply myself to compensate for my perceived shortcomings. I’d put in the extra hours. Pull regular all-nighters. Consequently, I was on empty before even the pre-shows: please see, what happened that Tuesday night at the NT. No support from within the industry then, either. No awareness around mental health or social difference. Better now, I’m told. I doubt it. (pp. 19-20)

For a working-class artist, getting a foot in the door is only the first challenge on a long road that, more often than not, diminishes you along the way. All the hard work Lewis did to make up for what he lacked nearly cost him the career he was working towards.

It was a powerful lesson for young Lewis. After the disastrous stage-freeze, he took a minor role in the thematically-named TV series People Live, People Die, People Live As If They Were Already Dead, and kept it for seventeen seasons. This despite hating the role, the show, and the way he was treated on set as little more than a vehicle for a prosthetic nose—a nose which precluded him from becoming a household name because no one recognized him out of costume.

After saying he’d quit countless times, his late wife would suggest he try for different roles. “What, and risk another Long Distance Runner, I didn’t say. I’d lost it, you see. The feistiness at the heart of me: it was gone” (p. 23). For working-class artists, pursuing a life of art is a question of choosing safety versus choosing passion, an existential dilemma we may face our entire lives.

As If is replete with references to other works of art. The book’s epigraph is taken from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951), which is also about two men who may actually be one man. And we learn that one of Lewis’s first professional stage roles was Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, a comparison echoed in the early exchanges of Lewis and Korine and their Vladimir/Estragon rhythm.

Both Prick Up Your Ears and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner are about gifted working-class young men being prized for their talent by a “benefactor” who imposes his will on them. The former is a biographical film about the playwright Joe Orton, who was killed by his lover and mentor in 1967. The latter is the story of a boy in a juvenile detention center who throws a race that would win him extra privileges after he realizes the administrators are using him for publicity.

Joe Orton appeared in Corey Fah as well, in which Waidner gave him an alternate timeline escape from his murderous boyfriend. I had never heard of Orton before reading Waidner’s work and I suspect I’m not in the minority there, even among literary-minded folks. By bringing him into the present, as in Corey Fah, and locating him at a turning point of Lewis’s past, Waidner insists that his work and life are relevant and worth remembering, and take on new life in the form of a living writer’s heritage and literary ecosystem.

It seems to me that these literary references are, at least in part, Waidner constructing a canon and context for their art. Organized along four main axes of working class, queer, weird, and resistant, major themes of Waidner’s canon include: making art (and surviving) in a capitalist society, solidarity among marginalized artists, releasing internalized shame, the inescapable oddness of existence, and maintaining a sense of self amid external pressures to self-alienate and conform.

There is a deep vein of defiance in Waidner’s work that insists on the vitality and necessity of the work and perspectives of working-class and queer artists. Corey Fah was about the fight for entry to an industry which tokenizes a handful of underprivileged artists in order to keep the rest of them out. As If is about what happens when you stop fighting for yourself and your art. Even with all that the novel has to say about the way the obstacles to artistic success can wear down a working-class artist, Waidner leaves the reader with a clear final message: It’s better than living as if you are already dead. Hear, hear.