Katie Kitamura’s new, and Booker Prize-shortlisted, novel Audition is a puzzle made of many parts. The unnamed narrator, a 49-year-old actress of considerable experience, arrives for a lunch appointment at a busy restaurant in New York City’s financial district. That she’s edgy is established right away, as she checks the name to confirm it’s the correct venue, and having done so, weighs the impulse to turn around and leave.
But she is a stage performer, and is wired to respond to cues. So when a departing guest holds open the door for her, she steps in. Once inside, as the host guides her towards the table where she has a reservation to meet her lunch companion, Xavier, a 20-something man of “natural charm” and “charisma”, she again hushes the temptation to flee, heeding “the imperative of mere courtesy”.
It is not immediately clear what is the nature of their relationship, which is evidently very recently formed. Even as they talk hesitantly, a background track plays in her mind. How may this meeting, an older woman and a young man, appear to the restaurant staff, to fellow diners, to an indeterminate observer? This heightened sensitivity to the observer’s perspective soon acquires a more tangible edge when she sees her husband Tomas enter the restaurant.
Her mind whirs more rapidly now, betraying an unexplained fear of being both exposed and let down. Tomas had said he’d be home the entire day working, so what is he doing here? What would she, in turn, say to him should he spot them? Perhaps she could introduce Xavier as a drama student, “which he was”, and ask Tomas to join them.
Rehearsing life
It’s just a few pages, but Kitamura has set the tone for the entire novel — the odd disjunction between the narrator’s disquiet over the behaviour of others (Tomas, Xavier, her colleagues at the theatre) and her own modes of communication (by words, action, gesture), all of it with an awareness of how it may appear to someone looking on.
It transpires that Xavier had met her recently to suggest that he was the child she had spoken of having given up in a press interview. There is a remarkable resemblance, he tells her. But she tells us, the readers, that the journalist had in fact been evasive while reporting what was an abortion.
All the elements in her current circumstances seep into each other — her unfolding acquaintance with Xavier, her married life with Tomas and, importantly it would seem, the difficult stretch in the role she’s rehearsing. The playwright has left it to her to find a way to negotiate a narrative break halfway through the play, a transition between “not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether”.
Unravelling minds
Soon after, Kitamura makes a transition too. Halfway through the novel, we are delivered to a reconfigured family scene. Here, the narrator, her husband Tomas and son Xavier are celebrating the “extraordinary success” of a play, which hinged on her ability on stage to make the “transition from the first half of the play into the second”.
At first this appears to be a sequel, however abrupt, to the first part of the novel, this inclusion of Xavier in the family circle. But when the narrator dwells on her “memory of [Xavier’s] room in his adolescent years”, the narrative divide becomes clear. Here on, there is an ever sharper sense of foreboding that the narrator’s world is just a step away from unravelling.
The specifics of the plot in the two parts and the biographies of key characters do not reconcile: Xavier’s status, the marital infidelity of the narrator in the first half and of Tomas in the other. It could be that the essence of the story lies in a delicate overlay of the two parts.
Early in Audition, Kitamura writes, “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, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
It could be that she is asking us to reference the two parts to get a grip on the uncertainness of intimate relationships and creative work. One part may be the ‘true’ version, and the other ‘imagined’ — or perhaps both bear elements of truth and imagination. To enquire is to be unsettled. As it was in Kitamura’s 2021 novel, Intimacies.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based journalist and critic.