My review of Katie Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, is up at Newtown Review of Books now. Challenging, rewarding. Unsettling.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, Kitamura’s latest novel contains many things jostling for our attention. The two parts, or perhaps twin novellas, which make up this work are centred around the same set of characters: an unnamed woman in later midlife who narrates these stories; her husband, Tomas; and Xavier, their son – or not son?
Kitamura shows how we are all playing parts, taking roles assigned to us. In the opening scenes, the narrator is meeting a young man; their relationship is obscure. From the moment she enters the restaurant, she is galvanised out of an uneasy ambivalence by a trifling gesture, a politeness offered and accepted, which renders her passive. She shows how compliance is the easier path. The novel asks us, in myriad ways, what happens when we don’t play the parts we are given.
The woman is a successful actor, playing parts in films and theatre over a long career. She lives with her husband, Tomas, an art critic, in a New York apartment where much of the action unfolds – play-like.
In both parts of the novel, she is performing in a complex lead role that transitions from a woman in grief in the first half, to a woman in action in the second. She has a sense that the playwright had grown bored with the character while writing it and wanted to write a different character. She reminds us that there are always two stories: the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it. Audition is strewn with such clues, Kitamura drawing us into her protagonist’s life as she reflects on her actions, and then revealing their impact on others whose stake in the events, and memories of how they played out, might be very different.
The act of performance, the actor’s craft and relationship with the script, the director and the audience, form a backdrop. Her final performances in her play’s run are parallel to the breakdown in her family and she knows that she must move on, that to continue it, though she loved it, would degrade both it, and her, as it died. Theatre, as she muses, is voyeurism, allowing us to witness, to stand apart. This allows us to feel by proxy, watching others’ lives unfold without consequence. Yet she knows also that one has to live with intentionality, to be self-aware, conscious.
Both parts of the novel show an ambivalence about motherhood. The narrator looks at the role, the part, and the way it defines her, and others. Then she sees its complexity, unpredictability, distortions, revulsion. She has had an abortion, about which she has no regrets, and which she mentions in an interview, but the journalist obfuscates, conceals, leading to a later, gross misunderstanding. She describes the look in people’s eyes, as though the unborn child exists, creating a new history. Kitamura’s revelation is that such narratives are countered by the untold stories of motherhood and regret: how our children grow into their own selves, their egos fully severed from their mothers, and may become people we don’t understand. Whom we may not like. This is the unspeakable – a woman not playing her part.
In Part 2, Xavier moves back home for a period and soon after, brings home a girlfriend, Hana, and the power in the family changes, the older couple ceding control to the younger as their known history is redrawn.
There had been an undercurrent of sympathy and tenderness in her voice, but when she turned to look at me, what I mostly saw was rage. I took a step back, although what I was afraid of was not her. I don’t know what you mean, I said in a low voice. There was never any reconciliation, because there was never any rupture …
Xavier’s experience, as told to Hana, was evidently different. At the end, he delivers his play, a monologue, to his mother, written for her, he says, for a woman of her age and general disposition, who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real. Her life has been in the theatre and she acknowledges that as a performer she has craved the recognition of her audience her entire life. She knows that Xavier, similarly, seeks to be seen.
In under 200 pages, Kitamura systematically dismantles the scaffold of a family, seeing something that, contrary to cultural norms, is not greater than the sum of its parts. It is a fantasy, ‘a shared delusion, a mutual construction’.
But it was too late, the room had already transformed, it was just a room in an apartment in a city, it was just a couple and a stranger, a person whose presence they no longer fully understood …
But that is not the end. It is a cleaving but something endures.
All Kitamura’s books are layered with mystery yet sharp in the minutiae – a hand on a sleeve, pastries set out for breakfast, a giggle during a macabre game of hide and seek. Her crystalline prose and intricate dissection of character invite us to look again. Audition is a book that can be read and reread, finding something new each time in its versions of truth.
Your Second Draft 