Book review: Audition

Upon closing the final page of Audition, the fifth swift literary offering by Katie Kitamura, one could be forgiven for questioning what on earth has just happened. Kitamura’s earlier works, including Intimacies and A Separation make clear that she relishes the murky, unspoken depths of human relationships. For her latest, Kitamura has told interviewees that Audition is not written as a puzzle. Yet in this crisp and blistering prose, it is plain that she has very much enjoyed the tricks that are deployed to great effect.

Audition is a story told in two acts. In the first, an unnamed narrator is a successful theatre actress navigating a difficult starring turn, unsure of the intentions of her precocious playwright. The opening pages twist with tension, as the narrator meets a man for lunch in a swanky Manhattan restaurant, terrified by the unexpected arrival of her husband at the same venue. The reasons for her nerves are both obvious and opaque; and it is the first unsteady and destabilising act Kitamura introduces, a harbinger of the uncertainty to follow.

The young man the narrator meets is Xavier, a character who is deliberately tricky to understand. His nerves, casual infatuation with the narrator, and his obvious practised mirroring of her famed on-stage movements during the lunch, all make it hard to identify the nature of their relationship. Is it romantic interest, professional admiration, or something more complex?

With Kitamura’s experience in mining the messiness of marriage, most admirably in A Separation, it is no surprise that some of Audition’s best scenes take place between the narrator and her husband Tomas inside their comfortable apartment, decorated with tastefully expensive furnishing and awash with boutique groceries and alcohol. The first cracks in their comfortable facade are the revelations of the narrator’s previous infidelity (which adds a retrospective layer of intrigue to the opening scene) and their decision, in this life at least, to not have children. The angst and nuance in that choice is crafted devastatingly and, as is the case in life, much of the anguish stems from what the couple do not say to each other.

Kitamura flips the script entirely in a high-stakes second act, and much of the enjoyment in reading Audition comes from returning to the first half to try to spot the clues (if there are any hints to be found). There is no change in genre; the setting, the main characters, and even the play the narrator is starring in all remain the same. But the final 40 pages are nothing short of a dazzling descend into chaos. Audition is bold, unsettling and a novel to be savoured in total immersion.