The Unsettled Self

Grace Linden reviews Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”

By Grace LindenApril 7, 2025

• Fiction

AT THE START OF Katie Kitamura’s new novel Audition, an unnamed narrator meets a young man, Xavier, for lunch. The restaurant is one of those impersonal, glass-and-mirror establishments that seem a dime a dozen in Manhattan’s Financial District. The meal is strained from the outset: the narrator is late and fears she has been spotted by her husband, Tomas; Xavier is overly charming and a little bit intense; and their age difference is too remarkable to go unnoticed. Most disconcertingly, he claims to be her son. Yet she remains adamant that this can’t possibly be true. When everything becomes too fraught, she flees.

The narrator, we soon learn, is a prominent actress in the middle of rehearsals for a new play called The Opposite Shore. But she is stuck and can’t find her way into her role. The problem is a particular scene—one that, the director says, is absolutely essential: “It is the moment when she locates her emotion, when the play breaks open, when she steps forward into life.” But this transitional scene eludes the narrator. It seems structurally unstable, an impossible fulcrum, so much so that she believes the playwright, growing bored, wanted a “different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether.”

As an actor, and a person of color, the narrator understands that life is made up of roles and parts. But all shape-shifting involves risk, and Audition, broadly, is an examination of the relationship between the two: when exactly, the novel asks, does playacting become metamorphosis?

Everything seems to come down to how much a person is willing to throw themselves into an act, a reality, no matter the consequences. Xavier, the narrator sees, will be successful “not simply because he was exceptionally mutable but because that mutability did not seem to cost him very much.” The choice is not between wearing a wig or using blonde hair dye but between wearing a wig or being blonde. The divide between performance and existence is gossamer-thin.

In the weeks following their meeting, the narrator continues to worry over the play and Xavier’s genetic claims. Xavier takes a job with the director of The Opposite Shore, and he and the narrator continue to meet. At a moment of potential resolution and possible clarity, however, Audition changes tack: the curtain falls suddenly and part two begins, opening in that same unmemorable restaurant. Tomas, Xavier, and the narrator have gathered to “toast the extraordinary success” of The Opposite Shore, only the play is inexplicably called Rivers. The production’s name is far from the only difference. The trio is a family, and the narrator is now Xavier’s mother.

Audition offers no segue, no bridge, and in that way, Kitamura’s novel reflects the play within its pages. Whatever caused this reset is never mentioned. It must have occurred offstage. Then, as if to double down on their new reality, Xavier moves in with Tomas and the narrator. The three soon settle into a routine, albeit a taut one. The narrator realizes “how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us.” For a time, a sense of happiness settles over the “reconstituted household,” yet no one appears to be fully at ease.

Kitamura’s syntax evokes this disquiet. She deploys comma splices and eschews quotation marks. Punctuation, under her nimble hand, elongates but does not define. The sentences that make up Audition are loose and unrestrained. The many breaks and pauses (the pregnant kind) give the text a psychological weight, forcing the reader to take on the burden of interpretation, to solve the riddle themselves.

Indeed, much of the drama of Audition seems to be of the interior sort. Instability rather than any external force drives the novel recklessly forward. Take this description at the beginning of the book. While out for lunch with Xavier, the narrator thinks she spots Tomas entering the restaurant. Instead of waving him over or acknowledging the coincidence—what are the chances that the two have chosen the same bland restaurant?—she does nothing. At home that evening, she waits for him to remark upon the encounter. He does not, saying instead that he spent the day with a friend. But the narrator does not completely believe him:

He shook his head again, I had the feeling he was deflecting, I could almost see him inventing a plausible body of work in his head, the more I thought about it the more unlikely it seemed that Said had made any real change in the direction of his work, he was excessively talented, but he was also lazy and comfortable and too used to the cocoon of praise and money in which he lived.

Those commas intensify the narrator’s stress and condemnation and thrust us into her head. They induce a literary anxiety that only continues to grow once Xavier moves into the apartment. The longer he is there, the more the narrator’s foundations begin to liquify. Smiles turn into grimaces. Threats become palpable. But this narrator, like all narrators, is fundamentally untrustworthy. Why should we accept her version of reality?

Mother, wife, actor, stranger. We never even learn her name. Instead, the narrator shifts awkwardly between these (and other) identities, perhaps because authenticity is hard to come by in Audition. The true nature of the self—any self—is unsettled, and there don’t seem to be enough words to adequately describe its shifts.

As a construct, the unreliable narrator is far from new, having cavorted through Wuthering Heights (1847) and Atonement (2001), the halls of Manderley. Unlike those stories, however, there is no real twist to Audition, or at least not one that we are allowed to see. The big reveal never happens. We never get the gratification of learning what transpired during the pivotal scene.

Instead, what we have been presented with is pure performance, and a textured one at that. The true dynamics at play are enigmatic, and the quality of relationships within this so-called family are mushy at best. More to the point, is this even a family at all? Audition seems to suggest that all families are invented, or at least contain invented elements. When she reflects upon her relationship with Xavier, the narrator discovers that her memory is “alarmingly inconsistent and full of gaps.” We are all playing roles in other people’s stories, peripheral characters to their turn in the spotlight.

To read Audition is to peer into a half-lit room. The characters’ contours are visible, albeit only just. The unknowability of others is a central theme for Kitamura, one she explored in her previous novels Intimacies (2021) and A Separation (2017). Then, and now, her characters question how well a person can ever know someone else. What, they want to know, does true intimacy really look like? Those books were more satisfying than Audition, perhaps because theater always brings such tensions to the fore.

But satisfaction is not a requirement for a novel. It is not a requirement to be told the complete truth, nor is it always possible to learn what is true for other people—or even necessarily desirable. The narrator soon learns this to be true, for sometimes knowing brings about a confrontation, and one that can never be undone. Perhaps this is why she prefers the stage, where knowing is always a pantomime. “I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance, that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire,” she reflects.

Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.