★ 01/20/2025
Kitamura (Intimacies) serves up a taut and alluring novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man. The unnamed narrator, a well-known theater actor, meets Xavier at a restaurant in New York City. Their first meeting took place two weeks earlier, and the woman doles out sparse and subtle clues in her narration, comparing her lunch with Xavier, now a college student, to one she had with her father in Paris. Kitamura keeps the reader guessing as to whether the characters are mother and son, lovers, or something else. Shortly after the lunch, Xavier becomes more involved in the narrator’s life, working as an assistant for the director of a play in which the narrator stars. She reflects on her ambivalence toward motherhood and the long-ago miscarriage she had with her husband, Tomas, after which she had a series of affairs. About Xavier, the narrator is secretive not only with the reader but with Tomas, and his suspicion that they’re having an affair threatens their marriage. In the novel’s second half, Kitamura further complicates the narrator and Xavier’s murky relationship. Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters’ blurry boundaries. Readers won’t be able to put this down. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Apr.)
"[Kitamura's] most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection."
—The New York Times
"[A] taut, keenly observed take on the roles we play. . . worthy of a standing ovation."
—People
"A deftly crafted, slow-burn psychological thriller full of sly metafictional reflections on the nature of storytelling and identity.”
—The Washington Post
“A short, propulsive novel that suggests that at work and in life, we are constantly trying out roles and making it up as we go along."
—Associated Press
“Prose so acrobatic it lands before a reader realizes it has leapt … You will reel, you will stagger, but you will not be able to look away from the stage.”
—The Chicago Review of Books
“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."
—NPR
"Kitamura’s novels have the propulsive quality of the genres she borrows from—the murder mystery, the courtroom drama—even though they are largely concerned with the distance between characters and the fine mesh of misapprehensions that constitutes most relationships...Audition continues that shift away from the idea of the public sphere as a place where people can understand themselves. There’s a sense that the greatest revelations take place deep within the private life—in places so buried that they can be accessed only through secrecy, delusion, or pretense."
—New York Review of Books
"A glittering work of illusion and desire."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribute
"A short but sharp novel of perspectives, performances and preconceptions … Audition is two acts about two acts. Read it and then read it again."
—Ms. Magazine
“A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace…. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”
—Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
“Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding … [She] reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.”
—The New Republic
“What Kitamura does is different. She is one of very few serious fiction writers who insist on not only describing but enacting the mirrored maze of impaired intimacy—the frustrating, unaccommodating realism we twenty-first-century dwellers deserve.”
—Harper’s
“A brilliantly disarming read.”
—Bustle
“Slim, yet powerful.”
—Town & Country
“Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts… The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard—and isn’t that the mark of truly exciting fiction?”
—Vogue
“Beguiling… Kitamura chooses to upend everything … as her story creeps toward a brutal climax. … Hypnotic and finely observant … sleek, provocative … a must for literary collections and for book club discussions.”
—Library Journal
“[An] elegant knife of a story. . . So much glints below the surface in [Kitamura’s] purring, pared-down sentences. . .In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Kitamura serves up a taut and alluring novel…complex and engrossing…Readers won’t be able to put this down.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Every utterance or gesture is freighted with subtext, and one elegantly polished sentence follows the next."
—BookPage
“Kitamura is a master of writing people who are both inscrutable and glaringly, psychically alive, which is to say real people, and obfuscation seems the point here, making this a perfect fit for readers of literary-puzzle novels.”
—Booklist
"Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly skilled writer whose fictions always seem to manage two contradictory effects: a supple seductive surface, under which the chaos of minds and repressed realities roil. She’s an original, building an entire metier of her own."
—Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
“You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood—and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.”
—Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
“Katie Kitamura is one of our most brilliant writers, saying far more in her silences, blank spaces, and disruptions than most novelists can say in a hundred thousand words. Audition is eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr.”
—Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds and Fates and Furies
01/01/2025
Kitamura's (Intimacies) beguiling latest stars a celebrated, unnamed actress playing the role of a lifetime, though where her performance begins and ends is the novel's animating question. When we first meet her, she has been asked to lunch by a young, good-looking man she barely knows, Xavier. Who they are to each other is unclear, as is the reason he asked her to the restaurant. Then she sees her husband Tomas enter and promptly leave; what might he think he saw? A middle-aged woman, approaching the twilight of her career, indulging the attention of a younger man while managing the unseen fault lines of a quiet but complex marriage: the premise of countless literary works. But Kitamura chooses to upend everything in the novel's disorienting second half, adding blatantly contradictory elements (maybe Xavier isn't such a stranger) and a well-timed antagonist into the actress's life as her story creeps toward a brutal climax in the final act. As in her previous works, Kitamura's prose is hypnotic and finely observant, with a cool detachment that avid readers of Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy will recognize. VERDICT This sleek, provocative novel is sure to confound readers; a must for literary collections and for book club discussions.—Michael Pucci
★ 2024-12-28
An older woman and a younger man struggle to grasp who they are to each other in a slippery and penetrating tale.
This elegant knife of a story begins at a mundane restaurant in Manhattan's financial district, which the narrator hesitates to enter. Inside, she orders two gin and tonics over a strained lunch encounter with Xavier, who has said he believes he might be her son. The narrator is an actress of some renown rehearsing a difficult new play calledThe Opposite Shore. It isn’t going well, and the actress realizes it falls to her to reconcile two impossible halves in its structure. As she fights through her dread, the novel launches Part II months later in the same restaurant, where Xavier and the actress are joined by her husband, Tomas, who toasts “the extraordinary success of the play.” In this jarring reset, the trio is now a family, the play is now calledThe Rivers, and the novel is mirroring the irreconcilable halves the narrator sought to resolve on stage with her body and her art. Kitamura rewards close readers of this through-the-looking-glass disruption. So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences. When Xavier introduces his girlfriend, “Tomas took her hand in his, his smile already an embarrassment to us both.” Kitamura’s great theme, explored via two other nameless female narrators inA Separation (2017) andIntimacies (2021), is the unknowability of others. This novel posits that even within a family, each member is constantly auditioning. As the tension mounts, and the narrator’s interpretation of events coils back and multiplies, she wonders “what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?” Over the shards of this realization, the shaken narrator and Xavier find “the possibility remained—not of a reconciliation, but of a reconstitution.” The book ends as another play begins.
In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.
