There’s a striking moment in Katie Kitamura’s unnerving new novel, Audition, when the nameless protagonist, an actress, settles into the grooves of a challenging scene. Until this point, she has played her role with an intellectual dexterity that translated on the stage into an admirable but mechanical representation. When she finally nails the performance, she feels different. “It was that here,” the actress says, “that the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed and for the briefest of moments there was only a single unified self.”

How jealous Kitamura’s other characters would be of this admission. The writer’s usual brood of protagonists—always unnamed, usually women, often in the business of translation—are constantly negotiating who they are and how the world sees them. Rarely do they arrive at a moment of integration. They remain domiciled in a liminal space, caught between languages and their own possible realities.

The protagonist of A Separation, a translator who travels to Greece in search of the missing husband from whom she recently separated, never reconciles her two selves. She lives a bifurcated experience, accommodating the legal requirements of a wife and the complicated emotional terrain of an ex. While roving the Mediterranean island to which her husband has absconded, this woman embraces a passive state, never challenging assumptions about who she is or what she is doing. Occasionally, as when she adopts her husband’s research as her own, this slippery identity becomes revelatory, unveiling the scope of her grief and the depths of her loneliness.

In Intimacies, Kitamura’s most accomplished novel, the protagonist behaves, at least initially, in a similar manner. She is a translator at an international court in The Hague, where the testimonies of war criminals and their survivors subsume her identity. At first, the narrator embraces her role and its startling level of neutrality, but then she realizes that she has become “a pure instrument, someone without will or judgment.” Unlike the translator in A Separation, the narrator of Intimacies does not take solace in her mutability. The objectivity required by the court not only emotionally distresses her but seeps into her personal life, rendering her a background character in her own story.


The quandaries of a divided self also haunt the protagonist in Audition, even when she occasionally finds a way to transcend them. As an actress, she is a professional vessel, someone who makes fictional characters real by parroting words that aren’t her own. But her latest role, in a play called The Opposite Shore, asks her to bridge the gap between her life and her acting. The task is a welcome challenge, an opportunity to experiment with abstracted identities and forge a new and more unified sense of self. Yet the transformation proves far more complicated than she expected. Outside of her gig, against the backdrop of rehearsals, a disquieting drama unfolds in the protagonist’s personal life: A young man named Xavier, many decades her junior, appears one day and claims to be her son. The actress is perturbed and a bit confused. She does not believe that he is her son, but as Audition unfolds, her surprise mutates into something else: She begins to wonder if that really matters. Can she become another person if she wants to? “There are always two stories taking place at once,” she tells us while observing colleagues during rehearsal, “the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and excitement of the performance.”

Audition opens with a bit of mystery. When we are introduced to the actress, she is meeting Xavier in a downtown New York restaurant. They could be a pair of lovers, and the protagonist relishes this ambiguity: She is an older woman with a younger man, and this, she muses, must have made her the “object of pity, if not outright scorn” for the restaurant staff and the other diners, given that women are always judged more harshly. Even though the narrator has rejected Xavier’s claims to be her son on the grounds of improbability (she was misquoted in an interview that he cites as evidence), she finds his performance fascinating. “I could perceive the outer edge of his thought, his personal delusion,” she observes toward the end of their meal. Later, after she hurries out of the restaurant, she realizes that while she felt relieved to be away from Xavier, she also experienced a “jolt of unforced admiration, for the totality of his performance.”

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Factors from the world outside the pair’s dynamic only complicate matters further. During her lunch with Xavier, the actress’s husband, Tomas, walks into the restaurant and then, in a quick and quite awkward fashion, abruptly leaves. While we never learn the reason behind Tomas’s hasty departure, we do find out that infidelity has clouded their marriage. “You’re not cheating on me again, are you,” Tomas asks his wife when she returns home from lunch.

Ambiguities like these abound. Kitamura’s crystalline prose imbues each of her scenes with a tension that coils tightly
before erupting later. In that fraught encounter between the narrator and her husband, the two engage in an edgy dialogue about their activities that day. Their West Village apartment becomes a volatile arena of silences, omissions, and furtive behavior. The actress tries to pry information from Tomas about his seemingly chance appearance at the restaurant earlier, yet he remains committed to a narrative of forgotten details: He says he met an old friend, an artist whose commercial success has dampened his work, but can’t remember anything about the painter’s new pieces. The actress searches for coherence in Tomas’s story while ignoring the lack thereof in her own.

Even as Kitamura’s taut and nimble prose turns the most banal interactions into unsettling drama, she is careful not to reveal all. Rickety time jumps and information that seems more missing than deftly withheld proliferate throughout the novel; they are there to create ruts in the narrative where there might otherwise be undulations. They also remake the certainties under which we previously operated. A different relational order emerges with the revelation of the narrator’s previous affairs: Tomas is not just a suspicious spouse but an aggrieved husband; Xavier could be a lover; and the narrator is someone trying to escape the isolation of her unhappy marriage.

Then new information shifts our understanding yet again. Xavier, the improbable son and unlikely lover, becomes an assistant to Anne, the director of the actress’s show.

“He loved the part of it,” the narrator tells us, “he longed for the role.” Soon the pair are seeing a lot of each other. Xavier meets the actress for coffee in the mornings, studies her intensely during rehearsals, and at one point even tries to advise her on how she might navigate a tricky part of her performance. As he becomes more involved in the narrator’s life, a Ripley-esque undercurrent develops as the actress toys with theories that the young man might be a charlatan. Still, her thoughts return to the idea of a son, especially since she and Xavier look similar: “We were comparable in coloring, there was the question of race, perhaps there were even individual features that could be considered alike,” she says at one point, although Kitamura never clarifies their ethnicities.

Just when you begin to settle into this strange twist in the story, Audition again embarks in a new direction. After the first section ends with the actress onstage, readying for a performance (“We begin now,” Anne says to her), we find ourselves once again in a restaurant—the same one from before. The characters are also the same, but their roles have shifted ever so slightly. The actress has just finished a successful run in a play now called Rivers, for which she has received rave reviews. At the celebratory meal, she is joined by the playwright Max, the producer Anne, her husband Tomas, and… their son, Xavier. An uncanny feeling creeps in as the reader recognizes these names but only some of the relations. The purview of that familiar nagging question expands: Who are these people to the actress, to each other?

Less concerned with the idea of performance than the reality of it, Kitamura takes risks in the second part of her novel that pay off. She digs into the relationships between the actress, Tomas, and Xavier, examining how they go from distantly affectionate to co-conspirators, and pulls from it an unsettling domestic tale. Xavier is now the adult son of Tomas and the actress, who moves home to work with Anne, and his presence destabilizes their routines and reveals the fault lines in their marriage. He starts a new relationship with a young woman who oddly resembles the actress in appearance if not in mannerisms. He’s now working on a writing project, a play that he shies away from sharing. The actress herself begins to refer to her memories of Xavier as a child and worries about her unreliable memory. Kitamura wrests our attention with her sinewy sentences and variegated storytelling; the narrative remains nimble, even as it rushes to a heady conclusion.

Audition becomes a kind of test for the reader, a subtle assessment of how they understand the performances required within even the most intimate relationships. We begin to wonder if the book’s first half, with all its ambiguities, had been an imagined version of Xavier’s play or perhaps evidence of the actress’s abstracted identity and unreliability as a narrator.

Propelled by the disruptive force of a story you can’t quite trust, Kitamura’s novel connects performance in social relationships to writing and authorial power. Kitamura plants the seeds of this idea early in the novel, when the actress admits that it was during a performance that she experienced the rare feeling of a unified self. And she returns to this idea near the end of Audition: “The meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom.” Doesn’t writing—the act of shaping a narrative—initiate a similar process? The writer conjures a set of characters, places them in various scenarios, and invites her reader into the imaginative plane. Meaning is created not on the page but through interpretation. A relationship blooms between writer and reader, and through it, new intimacies are formed.


By the end, Audition is a novel of both orientation and disorientation. It seeks to disrupt the facts of life that we take for granted while also challenging us to embrace a new outlook. In this way, it creates much of the same confusion and clarity found in the works of Marie NDiaye, especially her most recent novel, Vengeance Is Mine, in which the French author maps the fraying psyche of an intrepid lawyer who recognizes her new client as someone from her past. NDiaye’s The Cheffe is another useful reference for Kitamura’s formal experiment. The novel chronicles the enviable career of a brilliant chef, dogged in her pursuit of culinary perfection. Her story is relayed to us by an assistant, whose relationship to her threatens the veracity of his tale and leaves the reader to decide how much to trust it.

Kitamura, like NDiaye, revels in the possibilities within uncertain narratives. Audition is the author’s most ambitious work, a nervy tale that turns on itself to test the boundaries of the novel form. The actress—unreliable, a performer by profession—holds the two threads of the story together. Through her, Kitamura dispenses new insights about the nature of performance and the roles we play in our own lives and others’. There’s an occasional unsteadiness to the narrative, an imbalance that doesn’t always seem intentional, but that feels true of all performances where the riskiest leaps can yield the most satisfying rewards.