asianamlitfans | A Review of Katie Kitamura’s Audition (Riverhead, 2025) (Reply)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve always been a huge fan of Katie Kitamura. I fell hook line and sinker for Kitamura’s work ever since her unexpected first novel, but it was the unrelenting prose of Gone to the Forest, Kitamura’s second work that truly threw me. From then, I’ve followed her literary publication journey, reading with much interest the intriguing divorce story at the center of A Separation and the strange, disorienting world of The Intimacies. Audition (Riverhead, 2025) retains Kitamura’s enviable prose, though I’m not sure I understood what even happened in this novel. I may need someone’s interpretation. Let’s let the marketing description tantalize us even a little bit further, and I am definitely giving you that spoiler warning NOW: “One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.”

The reviews I’ve seen online haven’t really helped me figure out how I feel about this novel. Most have been raving, but I still find myself pretty perplexed. The first half of the novel involves the unnamed narrator circling around Xavier, a young man. It is clear that the generational difference between the unnamed narrator and Xavier is an issue: how do people see the two of them out in public? The unnamed narrator suspects that some might think Xavier an escort and possibly a young lover, and the narrator herself certainly finds Xavier attractive. For his part (and role, and the importance of roles will come up again and again), Xavier believes the unnamed narrator to be his mother based upon an interview that the narrator gave awhile back where she claims to have given up her child. This information was an equivocation that the interviewer never clarified: the narrator-actress had in fact had an abortion but the interviewer chose to cloak the meaning. Their meetup at the restaurant is interrupted when the unnamed narrator thinks she’s seen her husband Tomas there, though he’s supposed to be somewhere else. The fact that Tomas sees her, but then leaves the restaurant leaves her perturbed, and she goes after him. What ensues is a long monologue where we discover their marital strain that has befallen them, with the narrator having had a string of affairs. The second part of the novel shifts dramatically. The play that the narrator had been struggling with in part one has now become a major success, though now the play has a different name. The roles around the narrator have seemingly changed. Xavier is now in fact the narrator-actress’s son, and Tomas is Xavier’s father. Xavier eventually moves back in with Tomas and the narrator, though it is evident that there is some kind of subtext to the strain between parents and child. This section of the novel was the most difficult for me to understand. Xavier’s girlfriend Hana eventually moves in, and one day that narrator-actress comes upon them in some sort of strange interaction. The narrator-actress demands that Hana leave, which of course creates more strain with Xavier. The conclusion reveals that Xavier had been spending his time hammering away at a play with the narrator-actress inspiring the title role. The meta-dramatic conceit of novel may be playing with the various ways in which we perform socially expected identities, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the novel-of-ideas, and I found myself unwilling to let go of narrative coherence. Indeed, I wanted to make sense of how part 1 related to part 2: was one the reality over the other? Was there a way to put them together to make sense of them as a single narrative? The latter question seems impossible (unless section 1 is a version of the play that Xavier has written), but if we go with the sliding doors type model, I would have preferred a stronger way to unite the two sections, perhaps with the first one, ending in a way that revealed again some sort of meta-dramatic conceit. Whatever the case, the novel will get you to converse with someone, especially because you will want to find out the reaction of someone else who has read the novel. And, of course, whatever you feel about the plot, Kitamura’s prose will always be sparking. There is a moment in this novel where Kitamura’s narrator is essentially telling readers something that Xavier might want to know (something along the lines of: “Of course I didn’t tell Xavier any of these things), but the narrator only directs it to her audience in a kind of interior monologue. It is an exquisite moment and technique that enhances the intimacy that Kitamura can create through her fiction.

Buy the Book Here