Midway through Audition, the fifth and latest novel from Katie Kitamura, the unnamed narrator, an actor, muses on a particularly successful moment of performance. She’s the star of a buzzy new play, and in a solo scene at its “hinge,” she must transform from a “woman in grief” to a “woman of action.” During rehearsals, the scene bedeviled her, but since the play’s debut, she’s been eager for the transitional moment to arrive. “I longed for it in a way that was almost carnal,” she reflects. Each time she steps into the spotlight, the audience ceases to exist, and the narrator explores the scene and its many possibilities. Ironically, she never feels more like herself than when she’s acting in this scene: “here, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self.”
Such moments of authenticity are rare in Audition, a novel in which everyone is playing a part. A young man named Xavier, an “archetypal son” who may or may not be the narrator’s biological child, embraces the role of a director’s assistant, “like an actor moving on in the wake of a disastrous audition.” A young woman the narrator barely knows starts “playing the role of the dutiful daughter-in-law,” acting in ways that appear kind but are in fact manipulative and malicious. On more than one occasion, the narrator finds herself performing against her will, pretending to be grateful or pleased, because, as she puts it, “I have made a career of knowing what is expected of me, and delivering it.” Even in their most intimate relationships, these characters are as cagey as con artists, dissembling to their own advantages.
Performance is far from a new theme for Kitamura, whose fiction has long focused on how people playact according to their social roles. In A Separation (2017), an estranged wife searching for her missing husband in rural Greece pretends to be a distressed and faithful spouse, even though she’s been planning to ask her husband for a divorce. In Intimacies (2021), her acclaimed follow-up, the narrator, a translator at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, notices how every person who testifies has been “brought to the Court in order to perform a role”: the charismatic politician, the resilient survivor. The court is a kind of proscenium, much like the boxing ring in Kitamura’s first novel, The Longshot (2009), in which an aging MMA fighter tries to prove himself in a rematch against a fearsome rival.
In Audition, Kitamura brings together public performance and private performance, revealing the similarities between them. Plays may have scripts and stage directions, but so, too, do restaurant dinners, intimate breakfasts, and exchanges between a mother and a son. In Kitamura’s fictional universe, everyone is always watching and being watched, and adapting their behavior to fit the expectations of others. Even in our most intimate moments, this novel suggests, we are always onstage.
Like the play in which the narrator stars, Audition is divided into two distinct, seemingly irreconcilable halves. In the first half, set in and around a theater in downtown Manhattan, the middle-aged narrator prepares for her starring role in a new play called The Opposite Shore, and, at the same time, navigates her relationship with Xavier, a handsome and charismatic graduate student who happens to be the same race as the narrator. (We never learn the narrator’s racial identity, but we know she appears “racially indeterminate” and has a culturally distinctive name.) One day at rehearsal, Xavier, then a stranger, approaches the narrator and suggests that she may be his biological mother. The narrator demurs: She has only been pregnant twice; the first pregnancy ended in an abortion, and the second in a miscarriage. Xavier is undeterred, and the narrator is horrified when she notices that several of his mannerisms resemble her own—they recall gestures that she herself has made on-screen, “a series of movements that I relied upon when I did not know how to work my way out of a scene.” Like a devoted student or an identity thief, Xavier appears to have studied the narrator’s work and fashioned himself in her image.
This encounter inaugurates a charged relationship between the two characters, one that bristles with ill-defined danger. They meet for a tense lunch at an upscale restaurant, where they are mistaken for lovers—or at least the narrator, always self-conscious, worries that they are. They run into each other before rehearsal; Xavier has been hired as an assistant on the production, but the narrator, ignorant of his new position, assumes he’s been lying in wait for her. As he fetches coffee and holds open doors, she notes the malleability of his character: “I saw that he was absorbed in, or had been absorbed by, the role of the assistant, that he was performing a part he had studied carefully, just as he had presumably studied the part of my long-estranged son.”
The narrator’s husband, a dignified art critic named Tomas, lingers in the background of this new relationship. He crosses paths with the odd couple twice, but he never broaches the subject with his wife, never asks about the handsome young man who may or may not be his competition. (The narrator has had love affairs in the past.) She doesn’t discuss Xavier with him either, preferring instead to watch Tomas carefully, to study his gestures and expressions in much the same way that Xavier studied hers. Tomas, it seems, has secrets of his own. When the narrator asks him where he was on a given afternoon, the pause that follows “was so infinitesimal that it might have been imagined,” and yet the narrator is convinced he is keeping his true whereabouts from her. When she follows up with more questions, she notes on her husband’s face a “panic that he was not entirely able to conceal.” Such moments of close looking, reminiscent of similar moments in Mary Gaitskill’s fiction, recur throughout the novel, as characters, seeking the truth indirectly, look for cracks in one another’s facades.
Rather than damaging the marriage, the couple’s mutual suspicion appears to strengthen it. They grow more attuned to each other; they are deliberate in their shared rituals and conscious of each other’s moods. “I thrilled to his presence,” the narrator says of Tomas. “I had a new appreciation of his intelligence and kindness.” Her husband becomes visible to her again as a separate person, one with both surface and depths. “For the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost,” she observes. In this novel, as in much of Kitamura’s fiction, a marriage is a kind of provisional arrangement, one that could always change.
As the plot progresses and the play moves toward its debut, tension builds almost unbearably. Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding, and, reading this first half, one senses that an explosive revelation must be only a few pages away. Perhaps Xavier’s true motivations will be revealed? Or perhaps Tomas will confess to his own illicit relationship, one that dooms his long-standing marriage?
The section ends before any such confrontation takes place—a development that is disappointing but, for reader’s familiar with Kitamura’s oeuvres, not surprising. She’s always been more interested in preludes and aftermaths, in the preparation for a fight, or the adrenaline crash that follows one, rather than the fight itself. These are moments of reflection rather than action, times when people self-assess and take stock. What Kitamura works to reveal is how, in these moments of intense contemplation, we almost always reach the wrong conclusions, about others as well as ourselves.
In the novel’s uncanny second half, everything is at once the same and slightly changed. The section opens at the same restaurant where Xavier and the narrator once had lunch—but here, Xavier, still a director’s assistant, is presented as the biological son of the narrator and Tomas, and they watch the young man fulfill his duties with a mix of concern and pride. The family is celebrating yet another successful performance of Rivers, which seems to be the same play from the first half of the novel, now called by a different name. They are soon joined by the director, Anne, Xavier’s boss, who competes with the narrator for the boy’s loyalty. “I understood well enough that some part of Anne wished that she, rather than I, was Xavier’s mother, even if she didn’t articulate it in so many words,” the narrator observes. “Had she actually been Xavier’s mother they could not have enjoyed the particular rapport they had, in all its freedom and intensity.”
If the nature of marriage is the subject of the novel’s first half, the nature of familial bonds is the subject of this second part. To be bound by blood, Kitamura suggests, is, paradoxically, to have scripted and limited interactions—the opposite of the free and spontaneous relations that might take place between strangers or friends. When Xavier asks to move back in with his parents, they perform their acceptance theatrically. “It was as if I had been given my cue, it was as if I had received my prompt,” the narrator says of her welcoming gestures. They clean the apartment until, in the narrator’s words, it looks “like a showroom of our lives.” When Xavier moves back in, he acts with a kind of studied “naturalness,” laying out breakfast pastries and doing the dishes. The narrator suspects his behavior is a performance of maturity, even though she admits that his actions don’t seem calculated.
The nuclear family reconstituted, the apartment becomes a kind of staging area, a limbo in which the three characters live. Even as Kitamura, or rather her narrator, plays up the eeriness of the arrangement—describing the unnatural stasis of Xavier’s bedroom, the tentative way he moves about the space—there’s also something undeniably familiar about this depiction of the adult child’s return home. What young adult, visiting his parents, hasn’t found himself reverting to teenage behavior, much as Xavier does when he lounges on the couch and scrolls through his phone? What parent, welcoming the prodigal child, hasn’t eagerly resurrected family traditions while studying the child intensely, trying to see what’s changed during the time apart? “I realized how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us,” observes the narrator. “He was like a familiar stranger, someone you have known for a long time but at a distance, or perhaps someone you knew long ago.”
That turn of phrase—“familiar stranger”—might best encapsulate the vision of family presented here. These are people who recognize but do not know one another, who play at intimacy even when doing so creates feelings of estrangement. It’s not clear what Xavier’s parents owe him; nor is it clear what he owes to, or wants from, them. The limits of family loyalty are tested when Xavier’s girlfriend, Hana, moves in with them and starts to shift the balance of power in the apartment from the old to the young. (Hana reminded me of the hotel clerk Maria in A Separation, another unapologetic creature of appetite.) In her strange unfamiliarity, Hana points up all the mysteries in the family unit, all the things that are being left unsaid. Her stay culminates in a disturbing game of hide-and-seek, one that reveals Tomas to be a different man than the narrator thought him to be.
From the narrator’s perspective, Hana, the non–blood relation, is the problem; once she’s been expelled, the family will be as it was. But it’s not clear we can trust the narrator’s evaluation; indeed, Kitamura sows doubts about the narrator’s reliability throughout this section. (The narrator’s unreliability distinguishes her from the cool, cerebral women who narrated Kitamura’s two prior novels, both of whom come across as trustworthy in their passivity.) There are hints that the narrator’s performance of the “good mother” is just that—an act, one that papers over cruelty and misunderstandings from the past. The narrator begins to doubt herself: When she welcomes her son enthusiastically, is she showing her emotions or fabricating them? Has she misread Xavier’s desires, or has she misunderstood her own? In these moments, Kitamura reveals every mother’s fear: that despite her best efforts, she’s failed to love her child in the ways he needed most.
Who is Xavier? Is he actually the narrator’s son? This chilling novel ends with its central mysteries unresolved; its two halves exist in equipoise, each suggesting something about how we relate to our loved ones or fail to. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Xavier is a biological son or not. Family in this novel is a kind of fiction, or, in the narrator’s words, a “shared delusion, a mutual construction.” Her pronouncement reminded me of the conclusion reached by the narrator in A Separation, who, after playing the part of the dutiful wife during the search for her missing husband, decides “there was not that much difference between the grief of a wife and the grief of an ex-wife.” She continues, “Perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing.”
One is tempted to dispute such blanket assertions. Surely there are important differences between being a wife and an ex-wife, just as there is a messy, painful history to family life that distinguishes the family from a group of strangers. Kitamura’s novels tend to skim the surfaces of interpersonal relationships, offering neat snapshots rather than rich and full portraits. Reading her fiction, I often longed for more insight—not into the nature of relationships generally but into the specific people whose lives were taking shape on the page.
Still, Kitamura may be right that the language we have to talk about our relationships is inadequate. Words like “mother” and “son” conjure a set of associations that may be distant from our actual experiences of one another. The more we try to live up to those words, the further we get from ourselves. In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
