A surreal, perplexing, and utterly absorbing read that winds its way to a disturbing finale, Audition, Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel eloquently explores themes of memory, manipulation, and the psychological depths of performance.
In the novel’s first part, the unnamed narrator—an actress living in New York City with her husband, Tomas—is accosted by a young man named Xavier who bizarrely suggests that he might be her son. He bases this claim on a published interview in which she seemingly alluded to “giving up a child”: an adoption, he supposes. However, this was the journalist’s evasive phrasing; the narrator had actually been referring to an abortion. She corrects Xavier’s misunderstanding, while admitting to herself that the physical similarity between them is striking. Xavier retreats from his claim of kinship but grows close to the narrator nonetheless, taking on a demanding position as personal assistant to the director of a play she is rehearsing for.
In the second part, all this is turned on its head, or so it seems. The narrator abruptly starts speaking as though Xavier really is her son. She and Tomas welcome him back into their home, but the narrator starts to feel that something is lurking beneath her conscious memory, that her relationship with Xavier has a dark chapter that she cannot recall. This intensifies when Xavier’s girlfriend, Hana, moves in with the family and promptly initiates a series of subtle manipulations that undermine the narrator’s confidence in her memories.
Kitamura expertly coils loops of finely gradated meaning around her characters’ words and actions. By juxtaposing the narrator’s two sets of memories, she invites readers into the gap between them where amnesia, ambiguity, and gnawing doubt lurk. In her persona as Xavier’s mother, the narrator says that her memories of her son’s childhood are “alarmingly inconsistent and full of gaps.” Tomas’ comments and Hana’s insinuations about a supposed forgotten estrangement with her son distort her sense of remembered reality to the point that she is “no longer certain of what had taken place.” As the plot gains momentum, both the narrator and the reader lose all sense of distinction between the remembered and the imagined.
One of the chief delights of Kitamura’s style is her knack for memorable descriptions and turns of phrase. Of the apartment where she and her husband have spent their married lives, the narrator says, “We grew into it, and then we never outgrew it.” A playwright’s vacuous explanation of a difficult scene is “a way of talking rather than talking itself.” A man caught in an uncharacteristic act is like “a vessel that had been upended, everything that made him himself trickling to the floor.” One could catalogue many other examples.
For all the virtuosity of the writing, there is a tension between the novel’s two parts that does not feel quite right. But perhaps Kitamura has anticipated this reaction. Significantly, the narrator recounts her difficulty in coming to grips with a scene she is rehearsing, a scene that forms a “rickety transition between the two halves of the play.” At first, she believes the problem lies in the writing; later, the scene becomes her favorite, and she finds her initial misgivings about the writing “impossible to fathom.” Readers may speculate that this scene–within–a–play–within–a–novel underscores the narrator’s own transformation from childless actress to a mother whose son returns home and disrupts the ossified routine of her marriage. As in the fictional play, it is a matter of interpretation whether the alchemy works as the author intends.
Words by Jonathan Schlaefer
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