AUDITION, by Katie Kitamura
In the opening scene of Katie Kitamura’s new novel, “Audition,” a middle-aged actress of some renown meets with a much younger man in a faceless restaurant in Manhattan’s financial district. The woman, our narrator, is deeply apprehensive about the encounter, and is swarmed by thoughts of the various interpretations strangers could be making when they see her with the man: that she is a lascivious predator, or his doting mother, or something else entirely.
This is comfortable terrain for Kitamura, who over five novels has perfected the maneuver of burrowing into such gaps between our innermost selves and the roles we perform for others. Her characters are often passive, but can hardly be called inert. She traces the transfer of power between men and women with horse-race precision, suggesting that in every dynamic, we are constantly being fitted for new costumes and vying for a starring part.
“Audition” realizes Kitamura’s longstanding interests in the form of a woman who inhabits roles for a living. It’s her most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection.
The restaurant lunch is the characters’ second meeting: The man, Xavier, tracked down the actress, who remains unnamed, hoping to learn whether she was the woman who put him up for adoption years earlier. (It’s a fanciful theory on his part; the two are “comparable in coloring,” though their races are never identified, and they seem to share little else.) It’s “not possible,” she explains — she is no one’s mother using any criteria.
But it’s obvious Xavier still wants more from her than she will provide, and despite his sweetly immature tendencies — his order of a burger and fries, his inability to deploy either his charisma or his beauty to maximum effect — this imbalance threatens her. “Below the surface demands and obtrusions of his personality,” she thinks, “was a ruthlessness I had not perceived or prepared for.”
The narrator is caught off guard throughout the novel’s first half. Her longtime husband, Tomas, has earned the right to distrust her. “You’re not cheating on me again, are you?” he abruptly asks her early on, one of several exchanges that briefly kicked the breath from my lungs.
At the theater, she struggles to make sense of the character she’s been cast to portray. We learn little about the play itself except that the actress’s part requires a joining of two disparate halves — “the movement from the woman in grief to the woman of action” — that are linked at best by a rickety footbridge of interpretation.
All the while, Xavier skulks along the margins of the play, worming his way closer to the actress by insinuating himself into the production. So much is left tacit — are the narrator and Xavier actually having an affair? Will he harm her, or vice versa? — that every interaction is startling, to the point that a simple encounter involving coffee and pastries takes on the feeling of a hostage negotiation.
Three brisk words from the play’s director upend the trajectory of the story midway through the novel: “We begin now.”
Turn the page and you’re in an altogether different universe. The narrator and Tomas are still married in this dimension, and the actress is still starring in a play, to rapturous reviews. But Xavier now plays a central, enshrined role in their lives, encroaching on their aging, creative psyches with the sublimated menace of a young adult chasing artistic mastery of his own.
Few writers have nailed the interpersonal thriller better than Kitamura. “A Separation” (2017) follows a woman who somewhat ambivalently travels to Greece to search for her missing husband, from whom she has been secretly separated for months. In “Intimacies,” one of The Times’s 10 Best Books of 2021, Kitamura stages interiority on a grander political scale: An interpreter at The Hague must translate the testimony of accused war criminals, a job that requires her to enter the minds of monsters.
In comparison, the dominant mood of “Audition,” to elegant effect, is an even quieter form of dread. The actress is an ideal figure to further refine questions that propel Kitamura’s earlier work: Is it possible to ever truly know the people who surround us? How can we reconcile the acts we put on, even for our most cherished loved ones, with our slippery, truest selves?
The book’s structure mirrors that of the play in Act I, with its nearly impossible task of interpreting two competing versions of a character. As in rehearsal, the actress wrestles in life with the various roles she plays — wife, artist, adulterer, egotist.
“Too many parts — those onstage and in life — don’t endure, and once they are gone, their logic is impossible to regain,” the actress admits. Until then, it’s up to her to use the “voice that has been given to me,” and plunge into “the waiting darkness” that surrounds her.
AUDITION | By Katie Kitamura | Riverhead | 197 pp. | $28
