Audition

Katie Kitamura’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Audition, opens with a middle-aged actress meeting up with a much younger man in a restaurant in Manhattan’s financial district. We are not sure why, but she is anxious. Worried that the waiter or the people at a nearby table are speculating about the nature of their relationship, she is consumed by questions: Do they think she is a cougar? Are they being mistaken for mother and son? And did her husband also just walk into the restaurant and, upon spotting her, walk out?

As they eat their meal, the two do not say much—that is, until the young man drops a bombshell: “I think you are my mother.” She informs him that, no, that is not possible because she has never given birth. He seems to understand, but then, days later, she is shocked when he shows up again as the new assistant to the director of her current production.

Told in Kitamura’s trademark close first-person point of view, Audition follows this nameless narrator through the rehearsals for her new play as well as her home life with her husband. Not a lot happens beyond the ordinary. The world outside the narrator’s mind takes on an almost virtual quality, since much of the action of the novel occurs inside her head.

The narrator endlessly curates her inner life through constant abstract overthinking. For instance, she speculates that her husband suspects she is having an affair. Didn’t he see her having lunch with the younger man? She becomes more and more sure that he believes her capable of having an affair, which is something she is sure he himself would never do. She also feels increasingly perplexed by the young man’s story. Though she is certain that she has never given birth, she also gravitates more and more to thoughts about him: his facial features, gestures, his race, and his behaviors, which she has to admit do share similarities with her own.

Halfway through the novel, Kitamura does something unexpected. She resets the story, and we enter a kind of parallel universe, where the everyday life of the protagonist continues but with some important reversals. Now, she and her husband do have a son, who is none other than that same young man from the opening scene. Having money issues, he moves back in with his parents, and his father—the narrator’s husband—is overly attentive to the young man, purchasing expensive furniture to make him happy and allowing the young man’s girlfriend to move in with them in their small New York City apartment. The narrator now also wrestles with the suspicion that it is her husband who is, in fact, interested in other women. This will eventually escalate into an almost surreal scene in which the narrator’s mental stability is called into question as the reader struggles to understand what is and isn’t real.

This disruption of the storytelling—where the events of a single person’s life are told in the same novel and by the same narrator but through two differing psychological frameworks—is startling and original. Kitamura’s experimental technique here underscores the way narrative itself functions in constructing our lives. What is truth? What is story?

In previous novels, Kitamura has explored similar types of female characters, who are isolated and emotionally detached. In Separation (2017), for example, a literary translator travels to Greece to look for her missing husband, from whom she is separated, but at his request she has not told anyone the true nature of their separation. She goes to Greece to play a part, performing the worried wife as she tries to uncover what happened to her husband. In Kitamura’s follow-up novel, Intimacies (2021), the protagonist is an American woman living as an expat in the Netherlands, where she works as an interpreter at the Hague during a highly visible war crimes trial, all while she is involved with a married man.

Translators and interpreters are people who move between languages and cultures, becoming invisible in the process. In fact, that is the aim of their work—one is meant to forget they are there. Because they tend to be analytical and have a certain detachment to their own preconceived notions, they make for perfect character types in the interior universes of a Kitamura novel. And all of this could be said of actors as well, who become perfect vehicles for exploring the performative aspects of our social modes of being in the world, which is something Kitamura is exploring so vividly in her novels.

By the end of Audition, we have two competing and thrilling narratives of both the husband (cheater, or not?) and the younger man (son, or not?). But we also have two versions of the woman herself, as if to ask not only how well we can ever understand other people, even those we are most intimate with, but also to question our own selves vis-à-vis the performative social masks we wear. This is a memorable novel, and not simply for Kitamura’s beautiful sentences—it asks its readers to question the nature of truth itself.