Katie Kitamura’s Audition is quietly intense

It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’s beautiful, almost half her age, and she’s aware of how that must look to the other diners, the waiter hovering at her elbow, and her husband, who inexplicably enters after their food arrives before exiting in a hurry. She and Xavier had met two weeks earlier when he appeared at the theater where she was rehearsing for a play and said he had something “complicated but important” to tell her: he had good reason to believe she might be his biological mother.

This is the piece of information around which Kitamura’s confounding and quietly intense fifth novel, Audition, shapeshifts. The text is divided into two equal parts, which are at once intricately entwined and polar opposites. In the first part, the narrator explains to Xavier that she can’t be his mother because she has never given birth. To the reader she explains that she has been pregnant twice and had one abortion and one miscarriage. In the second part, she and her husband are back at the restaurant, with Xavier, “our child,” discussing the prospect of him temporarily moving in to their apartment in the West Village.

It’s unclear what’s real and what’s not: whether Xavier is a man in a muddle – after all, “the dates and ages, they line up” – or “a grifter,” “a con artist,” “in the grip of some serious delusion.” Even when the reunited family of three develop a new routine together, the narrator notes that Xavier still feels like a stranger: “In truth, it was not exactly like having our child back home again; it was like having some ideal version of him returned, altered in all the ways we had hoped.”

Things become increasingly strange and jumbled: Xavier’s friend Hana comes to stay, and the two of them slowly take over the apartment. As the balance of power changes – “the shift being entirely in Xavier’s favor” – the narrator begins to question her own behavior and memory. Having initially struggled to commit to the role she’s performing onstage, she’s left grappling offstage with the roles of mother and wife. What’s really going on? If you’re asking the question you’re already caught in Kitamura’s web.