To enter a Katie Kitamura book is to get lost in an ice palace. We marvel at its crystalline mazes, chills tingling our spines, wisps of breath twirling from the page. Nobody writes like her, those lissome lines and abundance of commas. She’s one of the few who can pull off tell-don’t-show.
“Audition,” her new mousetrap of a novel, raises the curtain on a Manhattan family in crisis and the ways fiction betrays our trust. Kitamura’s unnamed narrator, a middle-aged actor, is living the good life with her husband, Tomas, a writer, in a cozy West Village apartment.
Childless, they’re committed to their marriage and the artistic passions they share. Each morning one or the other picks up breakfast at a nearby café: “It was banal, indisputably bourgeois, the coffee cups and the stupid pastries — but that was almost the point.” She’s still winning plaudits for her film and stage performances.
The book opens with an unnerving audition of its own, though, when she meets Xavier, a theater hanger-on, for lunch at a downtown restaurant. He’s tall, lean, confident and much younger, claiming an impossible connection to her. Midway through their meal, she glimpses Tomas across the dining room; he immediately rushes out the door. She’s not sure whether he has seen her.
There’s plenty she’s not certain about, ambiguities which Kitamura — whose last novel was “Intimacies” — molds gracefully into a tale of desire in myriad forms. Xavier finds a job as an assistant to Anne, the director of the narrator’s current play; his presence is both delicate and destabilizing. Yet they relish their collaboration with Anne and Max, a rising female playwright, who confesses to the narrator that the piece is “different from anything else I’ve written. … It’s more schematic or rather it’s only schematic. Everything I write is based in excavating the minutiae of emotion, inhabiting the nooks and crannies of an encounter. But this is more conceptual. It’s arid, cold. She nodded to me. Much like your character.”
A clue!
Many clues, in fact. Kitamura continually drops references to her diptych technique. Halfway through, there’s a “hinge”: The author pushes us through a looking-glass and into an alternate version of events, recalling Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” or the dark secret at the heart of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Who’s afraid of Xavier: Tomas or the narrator? As the young man and his sinister girlfriend take over the apartment, our footing slips, familiar surfaces buckle. Kitamura’s visuals are terrific: “the effect was a little disquieting, there could be moments of sudden vertigo, when he seemed to bend the space of the apartment toward him, so that it was not Xavier but the apartment itself that seemed subtly wrong. A warping in the very architecture of the place.”
