American author Katie Kitamura has acquired a reputation as something of a writer’s writer – her work meditates on writing craft, interrogating the relationship between the ideas underpinning her work and the form of their delivery. Her previous novels have been well received; the most recent, Intimacies, was longlisted for the US National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and named by Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2021. As such, Audition, her fifth publication, has been hotly anticipated.
This is Kitamura’s third novel with an unreliable, unnamed first-person narrator – a point of view that allows the author to activate her great strength as a puppet-master of perspective and interpretation.
The short novel is constructed in two parts; both are narrated by the same accomplished actor who is contemplating the roles she must play both on stage and off. In her current production she is challenged by a scene where the character undergoes a subtle transformation with little direction: “the movement from the woman in grief to the woman of action”. This is echoed in the structure of the novel where between parts one and two the reader is thrust into a different dimension with no explanation.
At the beginning of the novel, the actor is meeting an attractive young man, Xavier, for lunch when her husband happens upon them. The nature of their relationship, and the tense, unstable, dynamic between them, is psychologically riveting and propels the narrative forward.
In part two, Xavier has situated himself in an entirely different position in her life. The connective tissue between the two set pieces is the narrator’s hypnotic unspooling of the narrative, but the world in which this novel is set is an abstract one, with little concrete detail to ground the reader. The degree to which that alienates or tantalises is a matter of taste.
[ The ‘other Americans’: 20 books that celebrate US literature’s rich diversityOpens in new window ]
This is the third of Kitamura’s novels where the theme of interpretation has been central to the narrative. Not least of all is the question of how people, and therefore her characters, interpret their own agency or lack thereof in their lives.
It is interesting that both parts of this novel could be read in either order and provoke similar questions of interpretation and understanding. It would be miscategorising to position this novel as a psychological thriller, but it is nonetheless psychologically chilling. If you are drawn to novels that raise more questions than answers, this one is for you.
