Last year, at a New York event commemorating the late Paul Auster, I glanced over the crowd and saw Auster’s widow, the prolific novelist and critic Siri Hustvedt, speaking to Katie Kitamura. I watched them for a few moments, and thought to myself that, apart from their mutual, once-in-a-generation brilliance, what they had in common was this: I would be mildly terrified to share close space with either of these writers, despite my ardent admiration, because of the dazzling, worrying acuity with which they observe social falsities. Very different novelists in some ways, they share the ability to coolly elucidate not just a particular milieu, but, somehow, the fundamental business of co-existence, all the ways we hide from and misunderstand one another, how we try and fail to disguise the fissures between us.
Kitamura’s fourth novel, Intimacies, was her breakout success, received with near-universal acclaim and chosen by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year in 2021. Intimacies deals in part with how we fulfil the roles assigned to us by others and by the systems from within which we struggle to survive. A translator working at the International Criminal Court at the Hague observes the well-choreographed functionality of the justice system and notes the essential absurdity of performing such roles in response to moral injustices of the most unthinkable and nonsensical proportions: acts which have no redress but which nonetheless we are compelled and obliged to answer to with whatever limited tools we have agreed upon.
Now, Kitamura has written Audition, a novel as fascinated by the assignment of roles and the failures and functions of our social contracts as its predecessor, but focused on a more confined and private set of dynamics. The narrator is a successful actress entering middle age. When we meet her, she is sharing an ambiguous, fraught lunch with a beautiful young man half her age. Her husband, Tomas, enters the restaurant, to her alarm, but fails to see her and exits. Soon it is revealed that the young man, Xavier, had formerly and incorrectly believed her to be his biological mother, an impossibility which prompts her to recall her experiences of pregnancy with Tomas, once ending in abortion and once in miscarriage. Xavier is going to become an assistant at a theatre where the narrator is currently rehearsing an important role.
Halfway through the book, the reader is wrong-footed when an alternative version of this reality is presented without comment, introducing a world in which Xavier is and has always been her and Tomas’s child. This Xavier is also an assistant at the theatre company, and is moving back in with his parents to save a little money, bringing with him, soon enough, a girlfriend named Marta whose incoherent and provocative manner confuses and enrages the narrator.
Like Intimacies, Audition is written in a style described by some as chilly or austere, one which observes its characters reacting, moment to moment, to events largely beyond their control, rather than dwelling within their interior monologues. It has the cumulative effect of building an unexpected sense of dread. This is a novel that draws its remarkable strength from the forensic examination of the performance of our social roles, which are doomed to frequent and humiliating failure. Its effect is somewhat reminiscent of noir cinema, particularly the sort which involves the disruptive spectre of the doppelgänger. The opening scene, in which the narrator is surprised in the restaurant by her husband but then watches him leave without having seen her, is mundane but deeply unsettling in its depiction of seeing a person close to you as a stranger, an alien, for a moment:
“But at that moment, Tomas froze. He had his hands in his coat pockets and he began rummaging inside, as if looking for something – his phone or his wallet, perhaps his keys. He had stopped in the middle of the restaurant, I should have risen to my feet and gone to him, but I did not move. As I watched, Tomas spoke to the host, who nodded and shrugged. Tomas turned and retreated, walking swiftly across the dining room floor, as if he had forgotten or lost some item of importance. At the same time, alongside or propelling that urgency, was something shamefaced, something hidden and untoward.”
There is a creepy sense of the narrator not having identified a doppelgänger, but having become one herself through her unintended voyeurism. She is the wife who has just glimpsed her husband as though never having seen him before, but she is also the stranger he perceived her to be, an unknown woman sitting with a beautiful boy.
Some have quibbled with Kitamura’s insistence on exteriority, but, as with Karl Ove Knausgaard, the forensic way she itemises her world does not confer bloodlessness but its opposite: a keen interest in human exchange which feels both passionate and sinister. I was reminded, too, of horror films that scare us through the slow erosion of social contracts, in which ordinary, socially minded people end up in terrifying, extreme situations because they are so committed to inhabiting the role of the appropriate, functional citizen. Take Michael Haneke’s Funny Games or Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil: both almost unspeakably nasty works in which brutality is enabled by an absurd adherence to civilised pretence. In other moments, the scenes between the narrator and Marta – the narrator is certain that only she can see the reality of Marta’s odd, manipulative actions – recall the Emmanuel Carrère novel The Moustache, in which the narrator goes slowly mad after he shaves off his moustache and nobody in his life acknowledges it.
Occasionally, one senses the limitations created by Kitamura’s aversion to belabouring her characters’ inner lives, though for me never in a way that interrupts or undermines the book’s compelling pleasures. We do not know, for instance, what meaning the narrator derives from her work in theatre, how its presence in her life affects her marriage, relationships or general existence beyond enabling the purchase of a West Village apartment and a moderately luxurious New York lifestyle. Admittedly, as the daughter of a playwright, I have an unusual appetite for theatre narratives, but it strikes me that, despite operating as the central organising motif of the novel, the theatre lacks much investigation. It’s a lost opportunity, as the theatre world is one in which social conventions are highly specific. The pressure cooker of the temporary saturation in a rehearsal period, the minor devastation of developing intimacy with people you are doomed to lose after a limited period of time: it is a manic, sped-up representation of what it is to know others amid the everyday limitations of ordinary life.
But any complaints of this nature are rooted in praise. Kitamura is totally in control of her prodigious gifts. Her confluence of style and ruthless intelligence is so distinctive that it feels almost like its own genre. Whether she remains in the terrain she has established or not, we are lucky to read her.
Audition
Katie Kitamura
Fern, 208pp, £18.99
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: David Hockney writ large]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment