Kitamura won’t let me go; the absence that her characters carry around are loaded with substance. AUDITION, like all her novels, asks the reader to accept the unraveling mystery at the narrative sweet spot--where it splits into two opposing circumstances that would be factually impossible, except this is fiction. And it is a device that works, it worked for me. On the other hand, don’t grab too tightly—handle with care, don’t try to control the narrative, just let it be, accede to the inherent contradictions, and don’t expect a bow to tie this up with, it’s not a fairytale.

I was a stage actor for a time in Austin (nothing big, nothing fancy)—so I do understand the unnamed female protagonist’s ongoing and new conundrums when attempting to flesh out her character. Even though she’s unreliable, she does have true feelings. She’s a stage and film actor, currently in a play. There’s a specific threshold or liminal place in the script, where she tells us that she is compelled to show the audience a major epiphany or transformational turn her character has reached. It may be the most important moment of the play for the actress’s part, at least thus far. The reader doesn’t know the play or the significant juncture, yet Kitamura keeps us fastened and tightly wound around it, as if we knew every line. Kitamura, subtly dazzling and lucent, does that so fluidly.

I said fluidly, not to be confused with fluently. I mean, there are time jumps, some that are almost spastic--- they move with a sharp jiggle. Just go with it. I interpret it as someone whose work life merges with personal life on occasion. Which is the true version and which is the alternate? I think it could be the million-dollar question for a plot-driven story. But this author leans more on theme and character, and playing with two different realities gives us the character and the actor. No wonder she is unnamed!

Language is Katie Kitamura’s magic wand. She knows how to lead or follow with it. Wherever a word or space puts or relieves pressure, she is sure to act. I never even mentioned the actor’s husband, Tomas (a writer) and the other male protagonist, Xavier, but there’s not much I want to say—readers will discover how her play plays into her personal life, and how her personal life plays into the play. Just note that you will either be distracted or driven by the narrator’s two lives. Maybe both.

Sentence by sentence, I was mesmerized. Kitamura’s novels are electrically charged with questions about identity. Here—is our character a wife-mother-actor? A wife-actor? In the twenty-first century, literary novels often ask the reader to examine a person’s identity, and how it is relevant to the story. Identity in AUDITION is the recurrent question with a circumspect answer.

The author is restrained in her text, her prose spare but exacting. However, certain questions must be answered in the abstract. “…I thought that it was true that a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience, that it existed, and was made, in that space of interpretation.”

Another stunner from Kitamura. Thank you dearly to Riverhead and NetGalley for sending me a copy for review.

Structurally and conceptually I loved this - but as we got further into the second narrative the more I was lost. If I had to pinpoint what, I didn’t think Hana’s character worked or was needed. But the way we have expectations of character upended (particularly Xavier and our narrator) I thought was superbly done.

Thanks to NetGalley and Riverhead Books for the ARC.

This is a book that will only appeal to a select few. The weird shift in reality halfway through, and the unreliable narrator will piss some people off. But I think I liked it? I loved the way the novel mirrors the play within it, where the second half feels like a result of a scene before it, something that the audience does not get to see, to the extent that its almost a different story entirely. Its a reflection on the performances we put on for others on a daily basis, asks if we even exist without performing a role. It's an intellectual exercise, concise enough that I enjoyed putting myself through it.

This is a book in two parts and it's up to the reader to decide which one, if either, and maybe both, are the truth. I had the pleasure of attending an author chat with Katie Kitamura and it made me fall in love with this creative book

AUDITION is a one of.a kind novel. It offers no clear answers, but asks the best questions. I loved every second of this book probing the nature of art, performance, marriage, and self.

Audition is set up in two parts. In part one, we meet an unnamed narrator and a young man at a restaurant. He thinks she is his birth mom, but she explains that that isn't possible. In part two, the two characters are in fact mother and son. And from there, the reader is left to puzzle out what exactly is going on. There is not one interpretation of what happened, which makes for a great book club discussion. This is a novel that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Kitamura's concept is genuinely intriguing—two competing narratives about the same lunch meeting, each rewriting our understanding of who these characters are to each other. The actress-and-young-man dynamic crackles with ambiguity, and Kitamura excels at making every exchange feel loaded with subtext.
The dual narrative structure works brilliantly for most of the book. Just when you think you understand the relationship—mother/son? mentor/protégé? something more unsettling?—Kitamura pulls the rug out and recontextualizes everything. The prose is taut and hypnotic, perfectly calibrated to maintain uncertainty without frustrating the reader.
Kitamura captures the performative nature of identity with surgical precision. Both characters are constantly acting, even in private moments, which makes the "audition" metaphor feel organic rather than imposed. The Manhattan restaurant setting becomes almost claustrophobic as tensions mount.
Unfortunately, the ending doesn't stick the landing. After such careful ambiguity, the resolution feels both overly definitive and somehow unsatisfying. The final reveals answer questions you didn't necessarily need answered while leaving the more interesting mysteries unresolved.
Still, this is a fascinating experiment in narrative structure that mostly succeeds. Kitamura's technical skill is undeniable, even when the destination doesn't quite match the journey's promise.

This novel's prose is defined by three stylistic tics. First, the most grating but ultimately also the most harmless, is the redundant descriptor: “slow and languorous.” There's also “his natural charm, his charisma,” “breathless and ecstatic,” “complex and contradictory,” and “a shared delusion, a mutual construction,” among others. The second descriptor never complicates the first; at most, it adds a half-note of precision. The writer who reaches for two adjectives when one will do distrusts either herself or her reader.

Next, there’s the piling up of clauses separated by commas. Elsewhere in the book, as in Kitamura’s other recent novels, it shows up as an artful comma splice, in the manner of a text that’s been faithfully translated from French. This syntactic choice has a similar effect to the doubled descriptors. It is soporific.

Finally, there's the conceptual cliché. As this novel is nominally about the theater, its key images have to do with reflection, masks, doubling, faces. “I stared through…the frame of my own face.” The book thus ham-fistedly announces its themes. Its protagonist, an actress, glides around her world reflecting on the nature of language as a broken vessel for ambiguity. There are no sharp edges, concrete or otherwise.

The novel eventually confesses, rather anxiously, its own bad faith. “In the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse…as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible."

I have no idea what actually happened in this book, but you’re not supposed to, and I think I loved it. It opens with two people meeting for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. One is an accomplished actress, and the other is a young man, but we don’t know who they are to one another. Halfway through the book, there is an abrupt shift and two competing narratives unspool. This book challenges our understanding of the roles we play in our daily lives–partner, parent, creator–and the truths that performances mask, especially from those who think they know us best.

I went into this book expecting to not understand everything, and still, I was shocked by how my perception of what was happening and how the characters related to one another shifted constantly. This required some effort and made me feel off balance, but it was so engaging, and the beautiful writing propelled me along. This book has so many layers to peel back and examine, and you can spin theories all day long, but in the end, I loved how there wasn’t a “right answer.” It’s all up to the reader and how they want to interpret it.

“Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or a psyche, but the natural imposition of my mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act..”

This is not a novel that I enjoyed. It was work to read it and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. While I agree that we can be many different people with multiple roles in our lives, this novel was a step too far for me. Since I was reading it for book club , I persevered. The prose is lovely, but I think I need to create a new tag for this one…I’m just not sure what that would be. I had the feeling that the author was just f@&king with the reader and I HATE not having a real chance at understanding the author’s message, because ultimately it feels like a total waste of time or that I’m not smart enough to grasp the meaning.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Audition might be the most polarizing novel of the year (so far.) When I looked at my Goodreads to see what my friends had rated it, it was a lot of 2s, a handful of 4s, and a lot of 5s. Going in, I knew nothing, and I think that’s best. It’s disorienting at first, and Kitamura’s prose demands the reader slow down and take in every word. I’m so glad I did. At the sentence level alone, I loved this novel. The writing is *so good*. I don’t know how anyone can rate it two stars (I know we all have our reasons, but have y’all seen what people rate Freida McFadden?) I digress. There is very little plot here, but the details and characters are so rich, it almost feels like a mystery very slowly unfolding. I read it in a day, and I’m glad I did, as I know I noticed details that I might have missed if I didn’t devote myself to it (it’s less than 200 slim pages.) Near the end, I began to think I might be one of those people who rated it two stars simply because I didn’t understand what was (or wasn’t) happening, but in the end, Kitamura, unsurprisingly, nails it. I’m still pretty sure I didn’t fully get all she was doing, and it’s a book I’d probably appreciate even more on the second or third or fifth reading. It’s an absolute masterclass in storytelling, writing, and character.

Audition is a slim little mind bender that will leave you wondering not only what is happening in the protagonists life, but maybe what's happening in your own. Are we all just actors on a stage?

Audition by Katie Kitamura is a quietly unnerving exploration of performance, identity, and the emotional cost of reinvention, centered around a young woman navigating the treacherous waters of acting and self-worth. Kitamura’s prose is spare, hypnotic, and precise - each moment pregnant with ambiguity and desire. It’s a subtle psychological drama that lingers long after the final curtain.

Kitamura is like a brain surgeon when it comes to working on a readers expectation of story structure, culturally, specific ethics, and expansion of possibility, and she uses no magic or fantasy to do so. While I take a little bit of issue with the relationship dynamic and power dynamic, she has set up in the narrative it works, and it works for a lot of people even when it polarizes groups. Not my favorite of all of her works, but definitely accomplishes her tasks which include head, tilting left and right while reading And engaging deeply with one’s own biases.

A propulsive book whose mysterious keep you pushing forward until the end... but when you get there, is it satisfying? Audition is more interested in asking questions than answering them, which can be a bit frustrating at times, but it doesn't overstay its welcome.

This book is exquisitely written. It's so good that it can be read again to fully capture all of the building nuances. It's so well crafted. Excellent and highly recommended. The audiobook was phenomenal as well. This book deserves all the snaps and praise about the roles we play.

I've always been a Katie Kitamura fan and Audition is just another piece that solidifies that for me. After the abstract longing of Intimacies, I entered this with a hope for even more blank space between the concepts. What I love most about Katie's writing is she leaves room for the abstract and the interpretation. I've seen some reviews saying there's just not enough to work with in this novel. To me, that's what makes it stand out. Not everything has to be tied in a perfect bow to be interesting and intriguing fiction. The space gives us room to invent something ourselves, which most novels do not offer.

Gorgeous prose. Readers who enjoy Kitamura's style will like this one. It's less accessible and more experimental than A Separation and Intimacies, and I respect that it takes some big swings.

I totally get why this book is so divisive. You can always expect Katie Kitamura to make daring choices that push readers out of their comfort zone. The theatrical/performance themes were really interesting here, and as always, Kitamura's prose is dazzling.

There were quiet moments here where this book really dazzled, but it overall felt very unfinished, and there were too many loose ends left for the ending to feel satisfying.