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Late in Katie Kitamura’s celebrated 2021 novel Intimacies, the narrator, a translator at “the Court” in The Hague, is in a restaurant with her manager when an acquaintance arrives and is seated across the dining room. Her attention is split between her manager in front of her, the acquaintance in her periphery who is behaving strangely, and a stream of thoughts she can’t suppress. It is one of many moments in Intimacies that captures the subtle but consequential features of human interaction.
In her depictions of how an unexpected turn of phrase, awkward silence, unbidden distraction or shift in body language can change the weather in a room, Kitamura is unparalleled.
Audition, Kitamura’s fifth novel, begins in a way that recalls this scene. The narrator-protagonist, a middle-aged actor in her final phase of preparation for a new play — and struggling to get a central scene right — arrives at a Manhattan restaurant to meet a much younger man called Xavier. He is seated at an oddly placed table between two doorways and they begin talking. But before the conversation can settle, another man, Tomas, arrives unexpectedly, and the tenor of the meeting shifts. Ultimately, we learn that the protagonist sees this as a moment after which “things were never entirely the same” for her. This simple line is freighted with meaning and the novel goes on to explore different versions and interpretations of these three characters’ lives.
Kitamura’s recent protagonists have been translators, a role naturally suited to her interest in seemingly small breakdowns in communication between people. The job of Audition’s protagonist gives this theme a different emphasis: performance.
No small part of the achievement of this novel is the way it makes an almost hackneyed trope — in which real life is “like a play” or actors reflect on the performances of everyday life — seem utterly original, and it does this through its unusual structure. Audition’s two acts explore the insecurities, intimacies, misunderstandings and performances of its three central characters in domestic and professional spheres.
The protagonist is a sharp observer, continuously noting the performances of the people around her and reflecting on the “parts” she plays and how they relate to the “whole” of her life. At one point, responding to a tense exchange about the scene she is struggling to perfect, she dismisses critical comments as performative — “a way of talking rather than talking itself”. Yet she also misreads and misinterprets situations, and sometimes dramatically reverses her positions.
In its second act, the novel liberally recasts the relationships between its central characters in a way that confounds plot, even if it remains thematically and tonally connected. Though the same tensions exist between them, the very nature of their bonds is redefined. For some this may feel like a frustrating act of misdirection or trickery, tasking the reader with an impossible puzzle to solve. Yet Audition is always engaging and thought-provoking and rewards multiple readings.
In one early scene, as the protagonist sits watching a charged rehearsal, she reflects: “There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think”. This might be an instruction for how to read Audition — to explore the porous connections between its two acts or “stories”.
The juxtaposition of the second act also affords the novel surprising moments of emotional heft. For instance, we witness a quiet domestic ritual of coffee and breakfast as both the backbone of a fulfilling marriage and the failure of a marriage to grow. We see tensions resolved and exacerbated, softened and hardened.
Audition’s interest in performance takes on a further layer of meaning via a striking scene in which Max, author of the play the protagonist is rehearsing — titled The Opposite Shore in the first half of the novel and Rivers in the second — makes comments that seem to link her to Kitamura. Describing the tricky scene the protagonist can’t seem to get right, she explains that it is “different from anything else I’ve written” before describing her writing in terms that evoke a commonly noted feature of Kitamura’s writing: “everything I write is based in excavating the minutiae of emotion, inhabiting the nooks and crannies of an encounter”. Intriguingly, the protagonist interprets these comments as yet another performance. One can’t help but wonder if Kitamura is reflecting on her own performance of a much-praised feature of her writing.
Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel. One might read it alongside watching Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-nominated body horror The Substance or Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller’s feted TV show Severance. All deal suggestively with performance, and the splitting of self and identity. Audition demands an attentive and careful reading but is also conspicuously of its moment.
Audition by Katie Kitamura Fern Press £18.99/Riverhead $28, 208 pages
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