Eliza Callahan’s debut novel, The Hearing Test, opens with a preface in which the narrator’s friend encourages her to watch the 1967 Soviet film July Rain. When she looks it up online, she finds the following description:

The heroes of this film are almost thirty and that very often at this time people have a period of revision of the positions already developed earlier. That is sometimes associated with loss. . . . That she loses her former closest person who becomes a stranger and distant.

If this summary scans a little oddly it is because it’s a translation, she tells us. The narrator of The Hearing Test, unnamed until the final page, is also approaching thirty, an event marked for her by the marriage of a close friend in Venice at the novel’s outset. On the morning she’s set to leave for Italy she experiences a sound in her right ear like a “large sheet of metal being rocked,” visits a doctor, and is diagnosed almost immediately with sudden deafness — a condition that is exactly what one might imagine it to be. She is unlikely to make a full recovery from it, or any kind of recovery at all. The “former closest person” the narrator has been prophesied to lose is beginning to look like herself. She never makes it to the wedding in Venice.

To leave one’s twenties, look around, and find you no longer recognize yourself is a common enough plot. But the plot of July Rain is not what Callahan has shared with us; its translation is. The slippage that emerges here is key.

When told of her diagnosis for the first time, the narrator describes the term “sudden deafness” as being “so severe that it verged on comedic for the wingspan of one moment.” The entire novel hangs in this feathered space. In one conversation, the narrator tells a family friend with terminal cancer that it is terrible she should die at her age, to which the friend laughingly replies she would rather die than go deaf. Callahan handles humor with a lightness of touch, both in form (at 176 pages, the book is slight) and sensibility (the prose is enviably precise), that good comic timing has. Think of Charlie Chaplin walking off into the distance, brokenhearted and twirling his cane.

Cruelly, the narrator of The Hearing Test is a musician by trade. After her diagnosis, she begins to keep track of her days through the accumulation of lists in a small black book; the medication she takes, the food she eats, etc. She calls this “keeping score,” and it is through this score that the quotidian replaces her vocation. In fact, it becomes it. The events of her days sharpen to a fine point: “every shred of life its own nail, and god a translucent hammer.” These nails, more often than not, take the shape of coincidences.

The apartment block where the narrator lives in Manhattan, and where she first hears the rolling sheet of metal inside her eardrum, inspired the apartment block in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. For filming, he built an exact replica of the building. On her way to a hearing test in a Californian clinic shaped like a seashell she passes the Paramount lot, where it sits under “a cape of dust.” August 29, the day of her friend’s wedding and of her diagnosis, is also the date that John Cage first turned his piece 4’33” — a composition of pure silence — over to the public at the Maverick Concert Hall. The Maverick is a place that her mother, and the family friend that is dying of cancer, both share a connection to. From the window of the clinic where her hearing tests take place in New York, she gazes out the window at John’s Cages, a store selling batting cages for baseball. “You have a great imagination,” an audiologist tells her during one of her hearing tests.

In Shirley Hazard’s novel The Transit of Venus — a story set to the unfairest of timings, that of unrequited love returned a fraction too late — one character tells another: “I’ve thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books. Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can’t be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn’t have to be fair or convincing.” Callahan’s coincidences play out on almost every page; characters overlap in shoe size and on maternity wards. The repetition of these connections gives the book its rhythm; one thing is always shifting into its translation, slightly warped.

If someone had described this contrivance to me before reading, I might have rolled my eyes. Thankfully, Callahan is up to something. Something to do with fiction. “Nothing is an accident,” the narrator of The Hearing Test is told at one point. Throughout the book she is told a great many things. As in the autofictional novels of Rachel Cusk, much of the narrative unfolds through conversations the narrator has had with others in life, recounted for the reader.

Unlike Cusk, however, Callahan’s are not a cacophony of voices funneled through a passive unsympathetic observer but composite parts of a score. As such, our narrator, or composer if you like, becomes an unreliable one, hearing damage notwithstanding. “Even in the instant when we speak to ourselves silently, there must be something like a tiny rip that separates us into the speaker and the hearer. . . . I found that this tiny rip had become, to me, imperceivable,” the narrator tells us at one point.

The narrator’s condition is largely inexplicable, which gives her misfortune the quality of dumb luck rather than tragedy. As one doctor tells her, “We can get to the moon but we can’t get to the inner ear.” The question, “Why did this happen to me?” — a bore both in novels and in life — is of little interest to Callahan. She draws connections not to illuminate anything, but to point to the unbelievable absurdity of events, like a punch line. In the early stages of her hearing loss, she records the following line, written by a Greek chronicler held hostage in Rome, in one of her notebooks: “When no cause can be discovered to events such as floods, droughts, frosts or even politics, then the cause of these events may be fairly attributed to luck.”

Not too long ago I saw the poet Alice Notley perform a play she had written, featuring a cast of gods and demigods, all played by herself. During the Q&A someone asked her how she felt about justice. Lifting her arms up into the air disparagingly, as if she had just been asked something very trivial, like what she’d enjoyed on TV recently, Notley cried, “Justice? Justice doesn’t exist! It’s an indulgence!”

The narrator of The Hearing Test cuts out sugar and stimulants. With the exception of some Japanese wool trousers, she stops buying clothes. She stops buying anything. As hearing fades, silence becomes a summit she has to reach. Callahan marches her protagonist forward, without so much as a backward glance. No one could accuse her of indulgence. It’s a difficult thing, I think, to write about a person undergoing a traumatic event, “a period of revision,” in the first person, and avoid claustrophobic introspection.

Or maybe it is that claustrophobic introspection has become so commonplace in the landscape of contemporary literature that doing otherwise has come to appear preternaturally hard. By translating plot into a score, the life-collision logic of chance, Callahan creates something bigger than a simple story of individual trauma — by relinquishing an easy sense of exceptionalism, Callahan achieves something here that you might call grace. Though never without a knowing flourish: a cane twirl. “But see,” she tells us, recounting a dream, “this could be a lie too . . .”