The Brooklyn Rail

An elegant middle-aged woman sits down to lunch with a handsome, much younger stranger. The waitstaff and other diners in the white-tablecloth restaurant steal glances. Are they on a date? Improbable, but not impossible given the obvious tension between them, though the idea of a woman on the far end of this age gap seems to make them all queasy. “The actual story,” the woman thinks, “the reality of what was happening between us in that moment, was much less easily imagined.”

Katie Kitamura’s third novel, Audition, explores the gap between how we’re perceived, both by loved ones and perfect strangers, and who we really are under the surface. She writes from the first-person perspective of the elegant, unnamed woman who lives in her tastefully-appointed West Village apartment with her husband Tomas. Tomas has a clearly-defined role that he performs in their marriage: that of the dignified, composed, confident, successful intellectual. They’re artists; he’s a writer, she’s an actress, and they have a coterie of successful friends in the art world. Their lives revolve around shared rituals: croissants and coffee in the kitchen, dinner at the restaurant around the corner, a stiff drink or two in their favorite armchairs, always in the “calm of each other’s company.” It’s all very cozy and comfortable, if a bit stale.

The arrival of the handsome stranger, named Xavier, exposes the flimsiness of the couple’s shared reality. When the narrator becomes afraid that Tomas knows she’s spending time with another man, she observes slight changes in Tomas’s behavior: an “infinitesimal” pause in his speech, the cradling of a cocktail, “exactly as he always did, but perhaps too exactly.” She says, “I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost.”

Audition is divided into two parts, and Kitamura spends “Part I” gradually revealing what’s going on between Xavier and the narrator. Theirs is not a romantic relationship, rather a question of parentage. Xavier believes that she could be his mother, based on an interview she once gave where she revealed that she’d had to “give up a child.” He was born that same year to an unknown woman. But apparently, Xavier is mistaken. She tells him that she aborted that pregnancy, and later miscarried another. Someone’s mother is not a role that she’s ever been called up to perform.

In “Part II,” Kitamura picks up with the same characters in the same settings, but everything is warped. On this side of the novel, it seems that Xavier really is their son. The narrator plays the part of a diligent mother, opening up the couple’s apartment to Xavier when he needs somewhere to stay in-between jobs. Tomas is the doting father, Xavier is the model son. But no story beat can ever be considered solid fact. Kitamura is constantly assembling and then scattering evidence of what's true and what’s a performance.

The narrator often can’t recall details of Xavier’s life, noting that, “in some ways when I looked back on his childhood, he was at once there but also not there.” When she asks him why he doesn’t read anymore—in her memory, he always had a book in hand—he offers a rote reply: his job keeps him busy. Similar to the subtle changes that the narrator observed in Tomas’s behavior, she notes here that Xavier’s answer is “odd, too generic for intimate conversation.” Immediately after, Xavier begins stockpiling books in his room. Are these characters actually related, or is this some kind of elaborate audition in which three perfect strangers cosplay a loving family?

In this novel, Kitamura’s readers will recognize the characteristic cool, quiet intensity of her prose, and her interest in the power dynamics of intimate relationships. What sets Audition apart is its improvisational nature. When Xavier moves in with his would-be parents, he promises that he won’t stay for long. Then, Tomas orders him a writing desk for the living room, which the narrator refers to as “a piece of furniture so ostentatious and so fundamentally obtrusive it seemed impossible to reconcile with any actual person’s life.” Soon, Xavier’s strange girlfriend is staying there, too. Tomas becomes an obliging butler, serving the couple cheese boards and champagne. He considers whether they might purchase the apartment next door and knock down a wall to make more room. The married couple’s life, once so safe and circumscribed, now seems endlessly pliable to another person’s desires.

As their lives spin further out of control, Kitamura leans into elements of psychological thriller, if not outright horror, to great effect. In an especially disorienting scene near the end of the novel, the narrator walks into her trashed apartment, where her family is playing a strange version of hide and seek. “Come out, come out,” Xavier says as he stalks the living room, speaking “in a voice I had never heard before, a high whistle that menaced like a growl.” Tomas is hiding on the floor behind a chair, “head lolling heavy from his neck,” a far cry from the man who “always relied so much upon dignity in the composition of his self image.”

Audition is a startling and unnerving examination of the parts we play, and how we hide ourselves even in the most intimate corners of our lives. Ultimately, readers are offered few definitive answers about what happens between these main characters, and who they really are to one another. While the ugly underbellies of Xavier and Tomas are seemingly exposed, the narrator remains an enigma. She is both carefully controlled and borderless. This characterization, and the story’s uneasy resolution, align with the novel’s architecture, but in the end offer no emotional core for readers to hold onto as it all fades to black.