The unnamed narrator, an established actor in rehearsal for a new play, meets a much younger man, Xavier, for lunch. Is he her son or even her lover? Just as she is telling him, ‘No relationship between us can be possible’, her art critic husband, Tomas, enters the restaurant, appears not to notice them and leaves.
Two weeks earlier, when they met, Xavier said he believed she was his birth mother based on similarities of appearance, race and a magazine interview in which she’d mentioned ‘giving up a child’. She dismisses this as delusional. She did have an abortion and later a miscarriage but definitely no son.
Xavier becomes the director’s assistant and helps the actor who is struggling with a pivotal monologue scene written ‘to segue, not between two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether’.
End of Part One.
Part Two opens in the same restaurant. The play has been a triumph. The actor, Tomas and Xavier are now a family unit, a bond that is tested when Xavier moves in to his ‘parents’’ apartment and unravels when his girlfriend joins him.
I found reading Audition deeply confounding. The sudden change in the relationships between the central characters is disconcerting. The book is called Audition but who is auditioning and for what role? Xavier eventually writes a monologue play about ‘a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real’.
I experienced the same problem. To gain any insight into how characters grow and develop there needs to be some basis in reality.
I found Audition intriguing but, ultimately, unsatisfying.
Reviewed by Peter Gray.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katie Kitamura’s work has been translated into 24 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Cullman Center Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations. Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Guardian, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
0 Comments