Book Review: 'Audition' by Katie Kitamura
Does a child make a marriage happier?
Elegant. Surprising. Unsettling. Audacious.
Those four words best describe Katie Kitamura’s acclaimed fifth novel, Audition, which considers the tension between authentic and performative family relationships.
In the opening scene, a middle-aged, married woman meets an attractive and much younger man in a fashionable New York restaurant. The woman is unnamed. The man is Xavier. Are they May-December lovers as the waitstaff, other diners, and (maybe) the woman’s husband, Tomas, seem to assume?
After an awkward conversation, Xavier admits he wanted to meet the woman because he believes she might be his biological mother.
Certain she misheard him, then astonished at his supposition, she laughs and says, “I’m so sorry, but that’s not possible.”
Or is it?
Halfway through the novel, this first version of the story ends and a new second version of the story begins.
In the first version, the woman is struggling with her starring role in a new play, The Opposite Shore. Xavier is an assistant to the theater’s director, Anne. He’s not the woman’s son. Instead, it’s Anne who forges a loving, maternal relationship with him, provoking the star’s envy and (maybe) regret that her marriage is childless.
In the second version, Xavier is again Anne’s assistant, but now, he’s also the woman’s and Tomas’s son. This version opens with the same restaurant scene, but now, Tomas, rather than wandering into the dining room and then inexplicably leaving, is seated at the table with the woman and their son.
She recalls:
“It was the same restaurant where I had met Xavier for lunch, all those months ago, before he began working with Anne, before the success of Rivers, although this time we were together, the three of us: me, Tomas, and Xavier.”
In the second, longer version, Xavier’s relationship with his mother suffered a break in affection, yet he remained close to his father. With his father’s support, he moves back into the couple’s spacious apartment, where they all resided together when he was a child.
“In truth,” the woman muses, “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. As the days passed, I realized how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us.”
. . .
“At times I would go in [to Xavier’s bedroom], ostensibly to empty the garbage or to leave fresh linen on the bed, playing the part of the diligent mother, but really to reassure myself that he was actually staying with us, that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination but that it was real, real, materially real.”
After a time, a fourth person moves into the apartment. This development dramatically raises the stakes, heightens the tension, and sets up a stagey confrontation that upsets the family’s delicate balance and forces the woman into a startling moment of self-doubt and reassessment. Is the confrontation real or a dramatization that’s (maybe) part of the play?
Similar issues arise in the woman’s stage performance in the play that’s central to both versions of the story. In the first, she struggles with her role. In the second, her performance is praised, the play a smashing success. Is her struggle real? Her success? How does playacting as a career affect her relationships with Tomas and Xavier?
“And later still,” she thinks, “there were [theatrical] parts that consumed me, so that I could say the life that was performed, on a set or in the theater, could at times feel more real to me than my actual life.”
Is one version of the story true while the other isn’t? Are both versions true? In which is the couple’s marriage happier? And if in one rather than the other, happier for whom? Does Xavier complete the family or does he displace or perhaps replace either of his parents in their affection for each other? Are all of their relationships genuine or merely performances?
The answers aren’t obvious. Or pretty. Because it’s equally possible that neither version of the story is real, but rather that both versions are mostly or entirely performative.
“What was a family,” the woman wonders, “if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?”
Released in April 2025, Audition was shortlisted for the Booker prize and is currently longlisted shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction prize. Readers who cherish creative, well-paced, and provocative literary fiction will want to add it to their to-read list. #
Marcie Geffner is a book critic whose work has appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Bookmarks magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English with specializations in Romantic poetry and literature in translation at UCLA. She’s an active member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Audition
Katie Kitamura
Riverhead Books
April 2025
208 pgs.
I finished reading Audition a week ago and found it unsettling. Perhaps I'm not ready to be challenged and sophisticated in my reading. I felt tricked when the second version appeared, and my main observations were that the characters all drank a lot, and that the narrator attempted quite a bit of mind reading. It helped me to read your review, however. Thanks, Marcie.
The dual narrative structure here is super clever,basically forcing us to question which version feels more "true" even though both could be performances. That bit about the actress feeling stage life is sometimes more real than actual life kinda nails the whole tension. In my own experience, when roles blur like that its almost impossbile to untangle what's authentic from what's rehearsed.