Audition
by Katie Kitamura
The opening pages of Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant.
Waiting at the table is a young man, Xavier, self-assured and faintly discomfiting. The meeting is edgy and awkward, rendered in a tapestry of small gestures. Initially, we wonder if we are being subjected to the prose equivalent of bad acting: a surfeit of fussy movement, signifying nothing – an impression heightened by the stumbling gait of the narrator’s run-on sentences.
But admirers of Kitamura’s previous novel, Intimacies, will recall the taut discipline of that book’s prose, and trust that, here, the language has been loosened by design. Sure enough, when the churn of movement and syntax is disrupted – appropriately, by the smallest of gestures – a deeper existential dread emerges. Xavier sits back, exhales. The narrator, with a sense of shock, recognises the movement as her own, “lifted from my films, my stage performances, and copied without shame. A piece of me, on the body of a stranger.” Xavier has studied her, she believes, then performed her back to herself.
Audition is a novel of mirrored halves, angled towards an absent centre. In the first, Xavier tells the narrator that he believes himself to be her abandoned son – something she makes clear is impossible. In the second, he is her son, or, at least, he is willingly performing that role. In the first half, the narrator recalls with sadness her affairs, after a miscarriage. In the second, it is her husband who has strayed. It’s not so much a question of which is real; this is a novel about the suspension of disbelief necessary for life to be tolerable at all.
Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition nonetheless thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life.
Sam Byers
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