Are you the same person at home as you are at work? What about with your in-laws? The American novelist and critic Katie Kitamura is fascinated by how we behave differently in different circumstances. In her novels, her characters always seem to be playing new parts in new places.
The narrator of her 2021 novel Intimacies, a female interpreter at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, finds herself unsettled by this instability. In the book, she meets a rather disagreeable man at a party, then a few weeks later spies him from her interpreting booth. It turns out he is an accomplished defence lawyer and is behaving in an entirely different manner — confident, affable, authoritative. If he had acted that way at the party, she realises, she might have gone home with him. “The thought was disquieting — that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.”
In her Booker-longlisted novel Audition, which President Obama has just chosen as one of his books of the summer, Kitamura takes that idea to its logical conclusion. What would happen if the same people were transported into a different life, playing different roles? How would that affect their personalities, or their self-image?
To make things even tricksier, Audition’s unnamed narrator (there are so many of those knocking about these days) is an actress taking on a new and difficult theatre role. When we meet her, she’s having lunch with a much younger man, Xavier, in a busy restaurant in Manhattan. They are an odd couple — the waiter exhibits “a flicker of surprise” when he seats them — with a “current of intensity” running between them. When her husband appears in the restaurant, the narrator panics and flees.
The narrator and Xavier — are they friends? Lovers? Colleagues? No, something weirder. Xavier, it turns out, had become convinced that the actress was his mother after reading an interview in which she talked about “giving up a child, some time ago”. An overly prim journalist was to blame for his misunderstanding — in fact, our narrator had had an abortion.
More misunderstandings are in store. During a difficult rehearsal for the new play, the narrator receives a text from her husband, Tomas, who believes she is having an affair: “It won’t do to carry on in this way.” Part One ends on a marital cliffhanger.
But in Part Two, things are looking up. The play, so uncertain in Part One, is, in this version of events, a huge success. Most of the praise has fallen on our actress: “I felt I could play the role a thousand times and still not reach the end, the boundaries of its world, I felt there would always be more to explore.” To celebrate, she has returned to that busy restaurant and has booked a table for three: for herself, Tomas and Xavier. But wait, now Xavier is the couple’s son!
What follows is an uncanny unfolding of an alternative universe in which the narrator’s relationship with Xavier is entirely different, which means that her relationship with her husband is entirely different too — all of which has an impact on her career, her sense of self, even her living room layout.
So which life is the “real” one? Or does it matter? Kitamura loves to give her characters jobs that gesture towards deeper literary meanings — if Intimacies was all about interpretation, then Audition might be about acting, about how even our most meaningful relationships and deepest held beliefs about ourselves are just a series of performances.
• Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List
Despite these clues, you may well find yourself, like me, closing this tale of one woman in two different lives feeling a little disorientated. It is a novel that asks questions and provides few answers — and Kitamura doesn’t quite provide enough justification for this odd and off-putting narrative conceit.
Nonetheless, there are other, deeper pleasures to be found in its pages. Kitamura’s great talent is describing the minutiae of human connections, how in the course of seconds an interaction can provoke sympathy, then irritation, followed by confusion. She can turn a single exchange into a symphony of implications. Read this book for her sentence-level skill and you might just find yourself enjoying the “infinite contingency” of its strange, uncanny plot too.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Vintage £18.99 pp208). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.