Katie Kitamura Gets Too Abstract

In novels about acting, what happens onstage tends to really matter. A good portion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park revolves around a raunchy amateur version of Lovers’ Vows that disturbs hopelessly uptight Fanny Price; more recently, there’s been the West Bank production of Hamlet in Isabella Hammad’s 2023 novel, Enter Ghost, and the teenagers’ dangerous improvisations in Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. In all these books, the details of performance and plot are key to understanding the backstage action, working like a built-in allegory that the characters can step right into and inhabit. So it’s notable that the production at the center of Katie Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, is barely described at all. We don’t know the plotline. We don’t know the setting. We don’t know anything about the characters or the cast. There are a few hints and plenty of actorly emotion, but mostly the play, a star vehicle for the nameless main character, is an empty space.

Kitamura has been practicing such sleight of hand for a while. The author, who has a Ph.D. in American literature, teaches creative writing at NYU — and in many ways, she’s a writer’s writer, focused on craft, well reviewed, and, in 2021, long-listed for the National Book Award. Her second novel, 2012’s Gone to the Forest, is about a farm in an unidentified colonial territory, a purposely vague mash-up of African, Asian, and South American signifiers. In her next book, A Separation, a woman’s estranged husband goes missing; she flies to Greece to track him down, but he remains tantalizingly out of reach. In her most recent work, 2021’s Intimacies, the narrator translates for an accused warlord from an unnamed country for an international court in the Hague.

In Audition, the gaps are a lot deeper. When the story begins, we’re in the blankest of places: a restaurant in the Financial District. It’s around lunchtime, and the dining room is large and generic. The narrator, a respected middle-aged actress, is there to meet a younger man named Xavier. He is a college student, and they don’t really know each other, but something has happened between them that we don’t get to hear about — yet. Xavier “was watching me closely, with a hunger that sat too close to the surface,” the narrator thinks. He apologizes for something he said to her recently: “You must have wondered if I had lost my mind, if you had reason to worry.”

The actress is unsettled, feeling her skin grow hot as she remembers “the fervor with which he had spoken that day.” The other people in the restaurant peer at them disapprovingly, assuming some illicit age-gap relationship. But before we can get to the bottom of why they’re there together, the narrator’s husband, Tomas, walks in through the door, possibly spots them, and retreats, shamefaced, “as if he had forgotten or lost some item of importance.”

That first scene, with its distrustful strangers, tamped-down emotions, and geometrically arranged characters — Xavier and the narrator across from each other, Tomas advancing like a line in space — is pure Kitamura. Minor gestures, like Xavier’s downcast exhalation, which the actress believes he lifted from her own performances in order to manipulate her, provoke massive internal upset: “Anger surged through me … The situation was more dangerous than I had previously understood.” It’s a surprisingly tense moment that doesn’t explain the stakes, full of feelings that aren’t attached to anything definitive, and it sets up the central question of the book: Can a novel conjure up emotion without stable characters? What happens when the protagonist’s traits are withheld, undermined, and revised again and again?

After a couple of chapters, we find out what went on between the actress and Xavier. He had come to a rehearsal unannounced, believing her to be his mother — he’s adopted, and according to an interview she did, she once gave up a child. The dates line up, and they look alike. But that would be impossible, she explains; she’d had an abortion, a fact the interviewer was squeamish about putting in print. Despite the conclusiveness of her answer, she seems a little unsure, or at least troubled. In the second half of the book, which could be a fantasy, an alternate universe, or just a slight shift in one direction, Xavier and the actress are mother and son, though at times he seems like a stranger to her, and there might have been some dramatic rupture in their past that she can’t quite recall.

You’d be right to think this all sounds slightly heady. It also seems like the culmination of something. Kitamura has called her two first novels, 2009’s The Longshot, about a boxer, and Gone to the Forest, “juvenilia” and “apprenticeship works,” and it’s true that they read like the work of a different writer, set in a different world. (They are not listed on the “Also by Katie Kitamura” page at the front of Audition.) For one thing, they are told in the third person, and Kitamura has talked a lot about how the first person is her preferred point of view. “First person popped open for me when I realized I could try to use it primarily as a mode of speculation,” she said on a podcast in 2021. The narrators of her three most recent books think of themselves as being very good at reading others but often find they’ve been interpreting things completely wrong. When these narrators realize the story they are telling is not true, it can be unsettling, even horrifying. And, following along, reading a narrative that seems solid and suddenly isn’t, we’re unsettled and horrified too — or at least that’s the hope.

Some reviewers have accused Kitamura’s novels of casting a chill; the generous reading is that she writes about how our emotional lives can leave us cold and isolated, rather than hot and heavy. In Audition, the aridity is the point, but it can be hard to stomach. For all their interest in absences and gaps and frustrated desires, her past two novels still kept the reader well fed. A Separation has a vivid backdrop — a luxe hotel in Greece — and, eventually, a dead body, while Intimacies takes full advantage of the details of court proceedings. But there isn’t as much to grasp on to here; the scenes about acting pass quickly, and the glimpses we get of that world, like a post-performance dinner where the actress is sullen and rude, are few. Usually, a setting like this would give texture and reality to an idea; here, the book is almost all idea. It seems Kitamura wants to say something else about translation and interpretation — the way an actor channels a script, the way you can sink too far into a role onstage or in a family — but the hat trick doesn’t quite come off, in part because we don’t spend much time in the theater. Instead, most of the action takes place in the actress’s tasteful West Village apartment, that blank Fidi restaurant, the coffee shop down the street. It’s a choice I’m sure Kitamura could explain, but that doesn’t dispel the feeling that we’re being kept away from something.

Not that there aren’t some genuine thrills. Early on, Tomas cautiously asks the actress if she’s cheating on him again, and the way his question abruptly recasts her character is subtle and impressive. Their marriage, unerringly polite and tense with tacit domestic negotiation, may be the true subject of the novel. “I realized that I was being handled by Tomas,” the narrator thinks indignantly during one seemingly friendly conversation. And when Xavier appears as their maybe-son, the family unit buckles under the strain, erupting into a scene of catharsis and role reversal that satisfies because it feels so out of place. Who are these people to one another, really? We may not need to know.