Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel, Audition, feels like the culmination of the themes of her earlier work surrounding identity and uncertainty. The novel begins with a middle-aged actress meeting a young man in a nameless FiDi restaurant: at first the reader is unsure of the nature of their relationship, but it soon becomes clear that the young man is claiming to be her son. He read in an old interview that she gave up a child when she was younger, and notes their similar appearances and the matching timelines, but the actress knows this is impossible—the child she gave up never existed, she had an abortion and the journalist felt uncomfortable printing that in plain terms. This young man, Xavier, begins to ingrain himself in our narrator’s life, as he arrives at the theater where she is rehearsing and becomes involved with the production, while our narrator frets over his presence and the rift it causes between herself and her husband.
The novel then shifts—to what appears to be an alternate reality, in which the circumstances match the first half of the novel but Xavier is the biological son of the narrator and her husband, and they raised him as a family in their West Village townhouse. The narrator is rehearsing for her play, which is complicated and impenetrable, but she also has some strange gaps in her memory and there are a couple of key differences in her interpersonal relationship that make her just a touch different from the woman we met in the first half of the novel.
In an interview with NPR, Kitamura explains, “I’m really interested in the idea that in all of us are irreconcilable, incommensurate parts of ourselves that can’t be turned into a single unified identity. That’s very much the struggle that the character is facing in the play that she’s rehearsing. At some point, she says, there’s not a kind of unifying identity for this character. The arc of this character isn’t there. And that’s the puzzle of the play, but in a lot of ways, it’s also the puzzle of the book, which is, it’s two parts, but they’re not meant to fit together. They’re meant to just sit alongside each other.”
Kitamura’s work refuses simple explanation or problem-solving, and the disparate pieces of the narrator’s identity feel like less of a puzzle than a necessary contradiction. The novel is clearly about performance in the literal sense, but also the performances that we put on for one another and ourselves. Such a fascinating piece on identity and motherhood.