May report

The good news is that all the basketball teams I like were eliminated from the playoffs this month. The bad news is that it didn’t happen until I watched a lot of games. The other bad/good news is that I spent the majority of the rest of my non-work time phonebanking and canvassing. Bad news for this book blog, good news for me and my faith in humanity. I did read one book in May, though! More on that below.

What I read in May:

Katie Kitamura, Audition (2025)—I spent the better part of the month telling people I was reading this book and that I didn’t know what it was about beyond that it, like Kitamura’s previous novels, explored ideas about language and questions such as “do we ever really know anyone.” Now that I finished the book, I’m relieved to find that my description of the book had been accurate, but also concerned that it might have been misleading?

Do we ever really know anyone, indeed.

It’s hard to talk about Audition without revealing the “twist” that transforms the narrative from one thing into a (totally??) different thing. But I want to talk about it because I am not even sure I understand what happened. I actually broke a personal rule of not reading a book’s reviews before completing my report on the book because I wanted to see if anyone could explain what I had just read! I did not find a solid explanation.

I’m going to talk about it so if you don’t want to know what happens, start scrolling now¹ and stop when you get to the picture.

..

..

..

..

..

..

The entire book is narrated in the first person by a middle-aged actress. In the first half of the book, she largely documents several tense encounters with a young man who claims to be the child she gave up for adoption, which isn’t possible according to the narrator, as she’d never given a child up for adoption—she’d only ever had an abortion and, later, a miscarriage. The half ends with:

1. the man becoming a daily presence in the actress’s life by becoming assistant to the director of the play the actress is set to star in, and

2. the actress/narrator reflecting on her struggle to get inside the role she’s playing in the show and make it her own—she expresses doubt that the playwright has successfully bridged the 2 acts of the play with a specific scene, asserting instead that the playwright “had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing . . . and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether. . . . [S]he had, essentially, no idea how to fix the rickety transition between the two halves of the play, the movement from the woman in grief to the woman of action” (87-88).

The second half of the book opens with the narrator now referring to the young man as her son and referencing moments from throughout their life together, as though she had always had a son and had parented him from the moment he was born until the present day. There is no reference to any of the “drama” from the first half of the novel, and the only “continuity” is that the narrator is still in the play she’d been rehearsing for and the young man is still the director’s assistant.

There are some extremely oblique suggestions—I am given to understand “oblique” because they are filtered through the narrator’s perspective—that, aside from conventional signs in the first half, signs inherent to the first-person narrative form, and aside from the complete obliteration of the first half’s representation of the actress/narrator as a child-free woman in a happy marriage that had, in the past, been destabilized by her various infidelities, the narrator is at minimum “unreliable.”²  

And I may be just a simple cavewoman book reporter, but I believe that on the basis of an anecdote in the first half of the novel—about an older actor who surprised the world with a powerful performance of “rare depth and complexity . . . [playing] each scene with painful caution . . . [and] turmoil” (73), but who, the narrator later learned, had not been acting at all and had, rather, been experiencing dementia—and the novel’s final scene, where the narrator’s son presents her with play he’s written about “a woman of [the narrator’s] age and general disposition . . . who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real” (194), we are meant to understand that the entire novel has been narrated by a woman with dementia?????

Or?? As Justin Taylor suggests in his Washington Post review of the novel, is the second “act” of the novel not so much a “restart” of the first as it is the other half of a möbius strip: ”Are th[e two parts of the novel] chronologically sequential or do they run parallel, like alternate dimensions? Is one version ‘real’ while the other is a fiction being written within that world? And if so, which is which?”

Probably? And either way, I feel like how I feel when a cruciverbalist creates a Thursday NYT crossword puzzle that sacrifices quality of clues at the altar of the chosen gimmick, that prioritizes pulling off the gimmick at the expense of all other norms related to clue-writing.

Which is to say I feel like: what meaningful thing about relationships, self-reflection, and language, can be said if the vehicle for narrating the story is a person revealed to have been experiencing a degenerative neurological disorder throughout the entire narrative? Because something like that really seems to undermine the foundational premise of the narrative—a career performer explores the myriad ways that performances in everyday life affect individuals and their relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and strangers—by pulling the mask off the narrator at the very end, as though she’s been a Scooby-Doo villain, to say “Aha! These are the musings of a woman clinically mentally untethered from the world she inhabits.”

I feel gross to have read the first-person narrative of a character who I understood to be unreliable in a “traditional” way (ie, in the way that any person’s narrative is, by definition, limited to/by their perspective), but who, all along, had been unreliable in a different way—namely, the way of having physically deteriorating brain matter. There’s something icky about using first-person narration, which invites readers to literally inhabit the mind of the character relating a story, and only at the end revealing that the mind the reader has been “inhabiting” is a physically unsound mind??

If I’m wrong (!) about the narrator having dementia, and the novel is more of a sleight of hand, like some kind of Now You See Me illusion, a “clever” set of acts that feed into each other, but narrated by woman inside the narrative, a woman who has “performed” for so long that she can “no longer distinguish between what is real and not real,” then I agree with the review that says Kitamura has become “too abstract” with this novel. There’s not enough “there” there in the narrative to support this characterization, to me.

..

..

..

..

..

..

This novel was not for me! And that’s a shame, because I really love the two Kitamura novels that preceded Audition!

Am I a philistine? I don’t need a plot spoon-fed to me—I don’t even need a plot most of the time!! I just think this novel was too much in Kitamura’s head and that she and her editor were so inside the narrative that they lost the ability to imagine what a reader would need to be able to see what they saw.

What I’m Looking Forward to Reading in June:

Claire Luchette, Agatha of Little Neon (2021)³

Jamaica Kincaid, Talk Stories (2001)

That’s probably it!! Primary is June 24! Early voting is June 14-June 22!

1  ”You’ve got to keep them scrrrrollllling”—RIP to the funniest audio I’ve ever heard that continues to live in my brain over a decade after I first heard it.

2  The first rule of first-person narrative is that the narrator is unreliable. The second rule of first-person narrative is that there are degrees of unreliability and the ways in which a narrator is unreliable are essential to structuring the questions and themes that a given novel pursues.

3  Book Club selection for June.