Audition: A Novel

“Audition raises profound questions about human relationships. . . . examines how we perform for, communicate with, and read and misread one another. . . . questions whether we are capable of knowing one another.”

Audition by Katie Kitamura is about performance—including how people perform in front of and communicate with others by projection and elision, and how we perform for and construct ourselves. Kitamura brilliantly designs her story about the relationships among a woman, her husband, and a young man into a Hitchcockian narrative that is suspenseful, multi-dimensional, and haunting.

On the surface, the plot of Audition appears simple and undramatic. The narrator, a 49-year-old married actress meets a handsome 25-year-old man for lunch. The nature of her relationships to Xavier, the young man and her husband Tomas is unclear. Is she Xavier’s mother or a Cougar-like middle-aged woman taking advantage of a younger man, or something else entirely? Does her husband Tomas know who Xavier is and what his relationship is to his wife? Are Tomas and the narrator happily married? It is impossible to summarize the plot in any detail without giving away too much.

To complicate matters, the nameless first-person narrator is utterly unreliable. She elides, lies, contradicts, projects, imagines and reimagines her narrative. After all, she is a professional actress. She herself confesses: “There are always two stories taking place at once, 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 the excitement of the performance.”

Katie Kitamura’s prose captures the voice and psychology of her narrator perfectly. Through the narrator’s contradictions, slips, and omissions she shows her narcissism anxieties, and desires. For instance, the narrator projects her fears onto others when she observes: “There was naturally a shift in the balance of power, which was felt by all of us.” But the reader is given only the narrator’s perspective and no evidence of the other characters’ feelings.

Audition raises profound questions about human relationships. It examines how we perform for, communicate with, and read and misread one another. It questions whether we are capable of knowing one another. And it depicts how we are always performing and auditioning. It’s no accident that most of the characters in Audition are actors. For Audition embodies Shakespeare’s words from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Such is the human condition.