This hotly anticipated novel explores the dark embers of the psyche

Sydney Morning Herald

29-04-2025

FICTION
AuditionKatie Kitamura
Penguin Random House, $34.99
I recently learned that before becoming a novelist, Katie Kitamura – one of the most sublime sentence-writers working in the English language today – trained as a ballet dancer.
Her previous two novels were lauded for their clarity and poise – her prose elegant and precise; her female narrators cold, reserved and exacting. Her style on the page brings all the qualities one may associate with ballet dancers: a taut approach to public presentation and a rigorous devotion to steely grace.
For years, readers have marvelled at her ability to traverse the internal landscape of the human condition with scalpel-like lucidity. In particular, she has an exquisite facility for unravelling the obligatory deceits women perform in a world made for men. In her latest novel, Audition, the final instalment in her triptych about interpretation, our unnamed narrator is once again sensitive to the demands of courtesy and expectation that women are 'expert at negotiating'.
In the opening scene, she is sitting across from a younger man at a restaurant in Manhattan's financial district. She is 49, a respected stage actor. He is 25, and an emerging playwright. She isn't sure what he wants from her. We don't know the nature of their relationship.
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'I don't think we should see each other again,' she tells him. Ah. So they've been conducting some sort of romantic affair. But no. We are mistaken.
The narrator, like Kitamura's previous heroines, stumbles into misapprehensions, misunderstandings, misinterpretations. As an author, Kitamura is always subverting our expectations. The young man is seeking something from her, but it's not romance. It's something weightier – more demanding.
He believes her to be his mother.