In her 2017 novel, A Separation, Katie Kitamura expertly explored the sometimes fraught territory of marriage. Kitamura returns to the subject of family life in Audition, a spare, shape-shifting story of one woman’s encounter with unresolved aspects of her domestic existence.
The novel opens with a middle-aged woman meeting a much younger man named Xavier for lunch in Manhattan’s financial district. The woman’s husband, Tomas, unexpectedly enters the restaurant before quickly departing, leaving it unclear whether he’s seen them. This is only the first piece of the carefully constructed scaffolding on which Kitamura hangs her coolly precise story.
The unnamed narrator is a modestly successful actress, while Tomas is an art critic. They appear to be a companionable couple, even as the emotional temperature in their West Village apartment seems to change from moment to moment. The narrator is immersed in rehearsals for the starring role in a new play, a role of “seemingly endless depth and variation, so that no two performances were the same.” But the hermetic quality of her relationship with Tomas is disrupted after Xavier confronts her with a startling claim about their connection—and then is hired as her director’s assistant.
The novel makes a daring transition in its second act, which is foreshadowed by the narrator’s obsession with a scene that “continued to resist me, it was the one thing I couldn’t fully parse, and without it I was unable to make sense of the part as a whole.” While retaining the triangular character structure, there’s a shift reflecting a radical and deeply suspenseful discontinuity that simultaneously brings the trio closer and fractures their fragile equilibrium, compelling the reader to reconsider everything that came before.
Kitamura’s characters are adept at indirection and evasion. Every utterance or gesture is freighted with subtext, a quality that consistently dominates over explicit expression as spoken words are filtered through the narrator’s acute, but often flawed, perceptions. Kitamura’s prose is spare and deliberate, serving up one elegantly polished sentence after another. In Audition, she delivers another psychologically acute and challenging novel of the sort that have become her signature.
