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Katie Kitamura
Audition
Audition
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The mesmerising new novel from the author of Intimacies that asks who we are to the people we love; shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.
SUSAN'S REVIEW
The metaphor of the theatre has been frequently used in literary texts as a concept for the self as a performance; for the way we play, knowingly or otherwise, different roles in the course of a lifetime. One of the most famous examples occurs in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It:
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.
And one man [sic] in his time plays many parts …
Associated with notions of inauthenticity or the burden of social expectations, the metaphor of the theatre has now been, as the cliché has it, done to death. But Japanese American writer Katie Kitamura’s new novel Audition is a refreshingly inventive take on a stale metaphor; one that I know will stay with me for years. Recently shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the novel’s very title signals its focus on the self-as-performance; so too does the fact that its central character is a female actor, whose profession can require a heightened awareness of self as ‘playing’ to an audience. Middle-aged, successful and critically acclaimed, the unnamed woman does indeed play several parts both on and off the stage: wife, mother, professional performer, colleague, de facto mother-in-law. She is also the first-person narrator of the novel: an artistic choice that by its very nature establishes doubt in the reader about the reliability of her perceptions and judgements. Can we trust her? Should we trust her?
Audition is structured in two distinct sections. Part One begins with a meeting in a New York restaurant between the actor and a young man named Xavier. Their halting conversation, full of awkward misunderstandings, establishes the narrator’s sense of the world as fundamentally, and troublingly, uncertain. She struggles to understand why Xavier, a virtual stranger, has asked to see her. Is it to follow up his earlier and shocking claim that she is in fact his mother? A claim she know proceeds to refute, based on his misunderstanding of a comment she once made in an interview. But on learning that his ‘real’ purpose is to tell her that he’s joining the production of her latest play, she wonders whether he means to charm her into finding a better position. Or is he wanting an affair? Do other patrons in the restaurant think so? Does the waiter? The already anxious narrator is even more confounded by the unexpected arrival of her husband, Thomas, who might or might not have seen her with the young man. The sight of his hasty departure from the restaurant sets up a series of moments in which she begins to question the ‘truth’ of her marriage and the honesty and sincerity of others.
This bald summary of the content of Part One, however, can’t do justice to Kitamura’s skilfully rendered imagining of a woman’s fraught inner life. The writing is edgy, sometimes to the point of nervous collapse, as the woman constantly questions her motives and those of others; assesses their gestures, clothing and facial expressions; re-thinks, is unable to think clearly, then is constantly beset by doubts. Is Xavier’s imitation of the gesture she typically uses on stage an unconscious tic, an expression of his admiration for her acting, or a sign of his mockery? Is her husband suspicious that she’s having an affair? Should she be suspicious of him? Why does she deride those theatre goers who identify with her (unspecified) ethnic difference? Is the marital ritual of sharing breakfast in reality a disguise for her husband’s boredom? Or hers? Her professional life – she is currently rehearsing an emotionally demanding role in a play – similarly clouds the difference between the real and the imagined. Is her performance as good as the play’s director insists? Does the play’s writer disapprove of the narrator’s interpretation of the role? One of the more poignant moments in this novel about the ‘reality’ of the self is the narrator’s discovery that a famous actor’s stunningly convincing performance of confusion is in reality a sign of his dementia. As such, the Part One raises haunting questions: how can we trust the ‘evidence’ of our senses to reveal the ‘truth’ about other people? How can we fully know ourselves? How can we continue to live in a world founded on illusions and self-delusion?
If this sounds sufficiently upending, Part Two is downright discombobulating. It begins with the woman, her husband and Xavier — the young man is now the couple’s son —conversing amicably in the kitchen of the couple’s New York apartment. It’s as if we, as members of an audience, have taken a break in the foyer, returned to our seats and are now, to our confusion and consternation, watching an entirely different play. The characters have assumed radically different roles: loving parents, an attentive husband and wife, and a charmingly dutiful son, now promoted as the director’s assistant. Even Xavier’s moving in to the apartment fails to disrupt the harmonious domestic arrangement. But then: enter Hana, Xavier’s girlfriend, whose very existence is unknown to the narrator, when the tensions so vividly established in Part One rapidly re-emerge. Observing the young woman’s gestures and silently appraising her words and tone of voice, the narrator immediately judges her as a both manipulative and judgemental. The dynamic that follows between these four characters calls to mind the plays of Harold Pinter, in which a confined, claustrophobic setting — in the novel’s case, the apartment’s living room — and unspoken hostilities enact the power plays and anxieties underlying personal relationships. Part Two also offers details that encourage us to question the narrator’s assumptions in Part One. Is she in fact the ‘good mother’ she thinks she is? Is Xavier writing a play an act of revenge on his neglectful mother, or, after an aimless youth, a sign of his maturation? Is Thomas’s touching of Hana’s breast an accident, as he claims? And in one of the most unnerving scenes I’ve read or seen played out on stage, do Thomas, Xavier and Hana pointedly, gleefully, exclude the narrator in their playing of a childish game?
What, then, is Audition ultimately about? At one level it’s a philosophical enquiry into the nature of selfhood. In particular, it asks us to consider whether the narrator’s constant state of hypervigilance about herself and others is an act of existential courage – an attempt to get to the ‘heart’ of who we really are; or whether what she ultimately discovers is the terrifying emptiness of the self. To return to the quote from Shakespeare: are we ‘merely’ players, destined to live a life of pretence, in which the self and others are devoid of meaning? If that isn’t sufficiently alarming, Audition is also a novel ‘about’ the simmering resentments, mistrust and outright rage that can characterise seemingly happy marriages and parent-child relationships. While this subversion of the nuclear family is a familiar idea in literature, Kitamura’s version excels in confronting us with what Sigmund Freud called the uncanny: the experience in which the everyday and familiar in our personal lives is rendered frightening, repulsive and distressing. In its Kafkaesque vision of the grotesqueness of the bourgeois family, Audition is neither a comfortable nor consoling narrative, but it’s an aesthetically exhilarating and psychologically profound reading experience.
Highly recommended.
PUBLISHER REVIEW
The mesmerising new novel from the author of Intimacies that asks who we are to the people we love.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young - young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner, parent, creator, muse - and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
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