This is a short, deceptively simple novel that delivers an expansive reading experience because it ends with the interesting question, what just happened? Narrated in the first person by a deeply introspective unnamed woman who has a distinguished acting career, the novel is divided into two parts of equal length, both featuring a young man named Xavier who may or may not be the son of the narrator and her husband, Tomas. Our narrator and Tomas are affluent New Yorkers who have each attained a level of comfort and renown. Enter Xavier: young, handsome, he has asked the narrator to meet him at a restaurant and in the opening scene he tells her he believes he is the child she gave up at birth. She denies it, asserting that her pregnancy had ended in abortion. The awkwardness of that confrontation haunts the rest of the novel and in Part One, where the narrator has difficulty bonding with her character in the play she is rehearsing, we begin to sense the emotional limitations of our narrator.

Part Two begins while the play is running, but in Part Two the major difference is that Xavier is indeed her son and soon he moves back into the apartment with his parents. As in Part One, the narrator continues to report on her thoughts and feelings, observing and remarking on all three members of the family, as though the orphaned Xavier of Part One didn’t exist.

A novel with contradicting parts invites the obvious question: what is the true version? This is not unfamiliar to fiction or the theatre, which, of course, is this novel’s context. Indeed, reading it, I was aware of echoes from absurdist plays where basic questions of identity and purpose go unanswered. By creating the contradiction between Part One and Part Two, Kitamura forces her readers to question the nature of reality. The narrator is the same in both parts and her thoughtful and astute observations of others makes hers a voice I believed. Keeping her consistent in both parts—her tone is even, and her observations and judgments are smart and perceptive—is essential to the novel’s success. Most reassuring, our narrator applies the same obsessive particularity to her observations of her own actions, as you will see in this excerpt from the opening paragraph:

"It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so that I stood outside and checked the address, the name of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake.…Something uncoiled in my stomach, slow and languorous, and I decided it would be better if I left now, and did not go in to him" (3).

The "him" at the end of the excerpt is Xavier and this is the prelude to their first meeting when she does, in fact, go into the restaurant. How she dissects that impulse is extraordinary, but here, I note that the first sentence of the novel is a run-on sentence, something I realized very quickly is characteristic of the narrator's style of speaking. Her manner is dependably unhurried, another quality that made me, in the beginning at least, trust her.

In Part Two, Xavier's return to his parent's apartment is at first disorienting to the narrator, but she and Tomas soon come to appreciate and enjoy his presence. But the atmosphere changes when he brings his girlfriend to live there too; the space shrinks and the family's interactions become strained.

The narrator's surgical dissection of everything that's happening kept me riveted. I loved spending time with a woman who is so alert to nuance. Of course, I would not want to be the subject of her cutting glance, and indeed, her lack of empathy is a theme that marks her character. Here she is describing the first meeting with Xavier's girlfriend:

"Tomas took her hand in his, his smile already an embarrassment to us both. She turned next to me, and I took her hand in mine—her skin smooth and her grip so light as to be an act of aggression, it left me with the sensation that I was holding on to nothing. She made it so that I was the one who was grasping, the one who was seeking more than was being given, and as I released her hand, I wondered what this evasive physicality boded for Xavier" (147).

I know that gesture: a handshake that is so entirely lacking in feeling it negates the welcoming spirit of this common ritual.

I read Audition with great pleasure and when I finished, the questions still tumbling around, I knew I had seen, without going to the theatre, a play in the absurdist tradition of Beckett. But what, after all, does the title refer to? That's part of the puzzle, another question that's more easily answered if I abandon my linear sense of time and think of it, instead, as simultaneous or circular. The two parts don't mesh, they don't make sense on a literal level, but when I consider the narrator's carefully curated self-restraint, there is a psychological accuracy I find stunning.

Kitamura, Katie. Audition. New York: Riverhead, 2025.

Filed under: A novel with contradictory parts