Audition (2025)
Why this one?
Continuing with this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. I’d held off on this one for a while, but I’ll come onto that later.
Katie Kitamura (1979– ; active 2005–) was born in Sacramento, California, and spent her childhood in the United States before her family relocated to Mexico when she was seven. Her family later returned to the U.S. when she was a teenager. She completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton and later earned a PhD in American literature from London Consortium. She is the daughter of a Japanese parents who immigrated to the US, her father as a professor of engineering. She lived in London for several years, where she met her husband, writer Hari Kunzru, and is now based in New York City where she teaches in the creative writing programme at NYU.
Kitamura’s first novel, The Longshot, was published in 2009 (though her first book, Japanese for Travellers: A Journey, a non-fiction work, was published in 2006). Her fourth novel, A Separation (2017), was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. Her 2021 novel, Intimacies, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Thoughts, etc.
Audition is very much a novel of two halves. A cliche, and one which has come up more than once in my recent reading, but never more true than here. In its first part, we are introduced to an unnamed female narrator, preparing for a role in an upcoming play, in which she is notably struggling to nail a key scene. A young man, Xavier, meets her for lunch in an upmarket restaurant, having previously explained that he believes she may be his mother (a seeming impossibility as the narrator has never given birth). They are observed briefly by her husband, Tomas, an art critic, who seems somewhat weary of her affairs and is behaving a little shiftily himself.
(At this point it’s worth noting that knowing anything more about this book will almost certainly spoil your enjoyment of it, so throwing in a big SPOILER WARNING before I move on!)
Just as we learn that the narrator may be on the verge of resolving her professional issues, we jump to the book’s second part, seemingly a few months down the line in which the play has been a success. However, it’s not long before we realise that this is no mere leap forward in time. Facts established in the book’s first half have shifted: both subtly (the title of the play she was preparing for) and more significantly: in this section, Xavier appears to now be the narrator’s son, on the verge of moving back in to the parental home, and with allusions to a shared history of memories that could not have been possibly in the book’s initial setting. This second section takes things in a very different direction: while the narrator here is ostensibly happier, a parent who has not apparently suffered the traumas of abortion and miscarriage detailed in the first half, and riding the wave of creative success, her life is taking a turn for the weirder - particularly with the arrival of Xavier’s apparent girlfriend Hana.
By the book’s end, we are left unsure as to what is real or invented, and whether or not it matters. Amongst several possible thought-lines the conclusion raises: Xavier has written a play about a character like the narrator - is ‘reality’ the second part and his play the first part (in which he reduces himself to a suiter for the filial affections of his mother and invents reasons for her distance from him)?; is ‘reality’ in fact the first part, and the second is one in which the narrator attempts to construct an idealised ‘better life’ to correct for troubles and traumas in her real life, a facade that comes crashing down as the section progresses?’; is the whole thing a thought exercise by the narrator, helping her come through her difficulties in comprehending what the author of the play in which she was acting has written in her troublesome ‘bridging scene’ in which a women moves seemingly inexplicably from grief to success? Or are all of these partly true? Or none of them?
Jumping back a little to my introduction, I mentioned that I’d been wary of reading this one. My rationale was that it seemed to be getting a lot of love from the same quarters as Universality, a 2025 longlisted book which I really didn’t get on with, garnering some direct comparisons here and there. I sort of get why this might have been: both are somewhat experimental, and feature a switch in which the reality we’re initially presented with is questioned. I think the reason why this one worked for me, and Universality didn’t, is that the latter felt like an unsatisfying parlour trick - you endured something fairly dull before - ha! - you’re given a one-dimensional lecture on why you were wrong (and have to put up with some dreadful characters along the way). Here, there’s no apparent right or wrong reading of the book. It’s in dialogue with itself in a way that only invites questions. That, for me, is an altogether more satisfying outcome. Though I appreciate it may not be for everyone!
That’s not at all to say that the book is some kind of postmodern plaything in which purpose is irrelevant. It’s perhaps better to leave the explanation to Kitamura herself, who puts it brilliantly in her explanation on the Booker website (again though, I’m VERY glad not to have read this before reading the book and sitting with my own thoughts for a while):
“The starting point for Audition was a desire to write about the long process through which children must necessarily grow up to become strangers to their own parents. I wanted to write about how certain universal experiences – of love, of motherhood – can sometimes feel like two mutually exclusive things at the same time. But rather than writing about that contradiction, I wanted to write it directly – to embed it in the structure of the novel. Reading the book requires holding two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and. As a culture, we’re becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads. And yet we live in a time of profound and increasing cognitive dissonance.”
Elsewhere in her discussion she also mentions wanting to achieve something like the effect of a David Lynch movie, in doing this. Which struck me as really interesting, in that while I’m overwhelmingly more of a fan of the written word than of cinema, I do sometimes think that (non-mainstream) movies tend to be more open to presenting multiple realities that can coexist despite apparent contradictions, where fiction, even of the literary kind, often seems more inclined to demand answers. This is obviously hugely reductive but it was something I was thinking of throughout my own reading of Audition - so clearly concerned with acting and performance and therefore inviting this kind of comparison. It also felt, on a more basic level, hugely visual and ‘cinematic’ as a piece of writing.
Overall, cementing that Lynchian comparison, it’s a hugely unsettling and disturbing read, without (mostly) straying into the realms of the straightforwardly ‘weird’, it manages to deliver a sense of ‘wrongness’ throughout. So much so, in fact, that I was slightly thrown by its opening sentence, which doesn’t make any apparent sense. Over the next few pages, it becomes clearer that this is a first example of a deliberate manifestation of the uncertainty we’re going to have to get to grips with as we go through this short but powerful novel: a sentence not ending quite how we expect it to will turn out to be the least of our troubles.
Score
9.5
Another favourite from this year’s excellent shortlist. I’m now beginning to realise why it was such a difficult year for the judges and why some brilliant books were left out!
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Next up
One more to go on the Booker shortlist, possibly via a brief diversion first though…
