Discussed in this essay:

Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28.

One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional funeral lamentation. This woman is a professional mourner (a “weeper”) who ululates on behalf of the region’s bereaved, people from whom, the narrator has heard, others “expect a good show.” Her services are needed because “the nature of grief” is such that “you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.” The weeper comes across a bit like a Method actor: “in order to really feel the songs, in order to trigger the emotion that you need to lament,” she says through an interpreter, she must draw on her own reserves of grief, which is why her performance has improved with age and the loss of her father, brother, and husband, among others. “You need to have a great deal of sadness inside you in order to mourn for other people, and not only yourself.”

This scene juxtaposes the mourner’s tearful keening, rocking, and gasping with another, less expressive type of performance, one shaped by what it conceals. Throughout the novel, the narrator is hiding the fact that she is separated from her husband, Christopher, who has disappeared. Having promised him not to reveal to anyone that their relationship is over, she spends the book trapped between the empty gestures demanded by a role that isn’t really hers and a “reservoir of emotion both unexamined and unknown, which only gathers and grows, a black and nameless pool.” But while the narrator keeps a lot from the other characters, more unusual is how much she withholds from the reader, or perhaps from herself; though the book unfolds as an internal monologue, we learn less about her inner world than that form usually entails.

In both A Separation and Intimacies, the novel that followed in 2021, something violent occurs, but offstage, and the narrator’s detailed ruminations never quite explain who did what to whom; how or why they did it; or even what the narrator makes of it afterward. Kitamura’s deliberate self-confinement within novelistic conventions—a single narrative in a realistic setting; a minute focus on the thoughts and feelings and everyday interactions of characters who gradually change over time—highlights her restriction of the reader’s access to the customary depths of the form. Her passive, watchful, alienated protagonists narrate in an uncannily restrained first person, marked by what they don’t know or can’t express about themselves and those around them.

These are books filled with images of disconnection and misperception. Groups, families, or couples are observed from behind glass, speaking foreign languages, or simply too far away to hear, glimpsed across lobbies or through apartment windows lit up like stage sets. Characters often appear as archetypes, their more specific qualities veiled, while their gestures and turns of phrase are obsessively analyzed for signs of insincerity. Intimacy is fetishized, especially the texture of shared private experience that accumulates between married people. Yet we almost never witness a scene between two or more people who know each other well, and when we do, an outsider’s presence constrains what they express. We’re continually reminded of what we’re missing, pressing our greasy noses up against the glass of subjectivity, trying to peer inside. Instead of inhabiting another mind, observing the world from its perspective, we witness its lonely self-interrogation: What is happening out there? And what is going on in here—what, if anything, runs underneath my social performance? Sheer lack? Or could it be something more sinister?

A suspicion lurks in contemporary literary discourse that interiority is less interior than it used to be, that in place of a cast of “round” characters who develop through experience, recent fiction favors the solitary observer, a mind either constricted or diffused throughout the text (if there is no outside, there can be no inside). One thinks of depressive, overmedicated narrators in novels by Ottessa Moshfegh or Emma Cline, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, or the anglophone vogue for Sebaldian autofiction. But what Kitamura does is different. She is one of very few serious fiction writers who insist on not only describing but enacting the mirrored maze of impaired intimacy—the frustrating, unaccommodating realism we twenty-first-century dwellers deserve. She puts her readers outside the transitional, paradoxical arena of imaginative play that is fiction’s usual province, in which there’s no fretful obligation to locate a line between truth and invention. Always in control of her effects, she chooses not to offer the compensatory pleasures provided by other writers. We get no stories and voices like those brimming to fill the space left by Cusk’s reticent narrator, none of the borderless, epiphanic encounters with art or landscape typical of the work of Ben Lerner.

For me, Kitamura’s approach to character, notwithstanding its evident European influences, most strongly recalls what the theater and film scholar Shonni Enelow has identified as an ascendant strain in American movie acting: a resolutely contained, withholding style for an anxious, dissociated, hypermediated age of forever wars, prolonged socioeconomic crises, and numbing, relentless exploitation. A retreat from the more maximalist, keening-and-weeping approach that had been dominant in film for so long, this style (employed by the likes of Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence, and Oscar Isaac) resonates with audiences as a kind of antiperformance, signaling a new pessimism about the value of expression—and signaling, too, a form of stealth resistance, a refusal to yield up any remaining scraps of self to the meat grinder of ubiquitous surveillance and enforced display. It casts doubt, in ethical as well as aesthetic terms, on the whole hoary notion of psychological depth, whispering that we shouldn’t need, and have no right, to roam another person’s inner landscape. The implication is that while these characters do guard some private realm of feeling, that realm is difficult for even them to access—less a story beneath the story than a murky, wordless reservoir of pain, that “black and nameless pool.” It would be impossible to show or speak this pain directly, and to deliberately represent or perform it would be suspect, transactional—grubby as the bills the embarrassed narrator of A Separation leaves on the table for the elderly weeper.

It is thus both apt and a little startling that Kitamura’s new novel, Audition—the last and most formally ambitious text in what now appears to be a loose trilogy of anxiety-provoking, insistently dissociative works preoccupied with questions of authenticity; interpretation; the treacheries of language; the lines between public and private, reality and fiction; and the seductive impossibility of intimacy—is narrated by an actress. Whereas the settings of A Separation and Intimacies provided a wider frame in which wealth and glamour directly (and violently) encountered deprivation, here we get only the first half of that equation, with the larger stakes mostly yanked away. Kitamura’s Brechtian mistrust of pleasurable illusion and her suspicion of expressiveness meet in a portrait of dueling con artists auditioning for each other, writing each other’s parts, competing to produce the most captivating emotion out of a void. Having perfected what could have been a winning formula with Intimacies—joining an interest in deception and a withholding style with an indictment of our era’s political tendencies—Kitamura has chosen to explode it here, turning to smaller interpersonal dynamics, literalizing her preferred themes, and pushing against the limits of her considerable powers to wrest them into allegory. At times Audition invites comparison with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, a richer, more symphonic meditation on related themes of art, performance, love, and responsibility that likewise aims to shift the bounds of reality and illusion without undermining its substance.

Very slowly, the narrator of Audition unfolds an uneventful yet ominous tale. At forty-nine, she is ensconced in a happy marriage, a comfortable Manhattan home, and a thriving career in which—despite refusing to change her name so as to capitalize on her “racially indeterminate” features—she is at last being offered

parts that consumed me, so that I could say the life that was performed, on a set or in the theater, could at times feel more real to me than my actual life . . . a danger for a person of my disposition.

Having reached this enviable station, she has a lot to lose, and seems unusually conscious of that fact, relating each small turn and decision in a tone of hushed intensity, as if moving along a precipice. The reader is aware that her attention is being sought and held almost against her will. The narrator’s description of seeing an earlier play by Max, the playwright whose new work she’s currently rehearsing, appears as a wry self-portrait:

Tension grew out of every scene, scenes in which nothing took place and people said very little, and yet the pressure grew and grew so that by the end of the play I realized I had been in a sickening state of unease for some time, and when I emerged from the theater I was simultaneously invigorated and physically exhausted, every nerve in my body still standing on end.

Kitamura is certainly capable of inducing such states; she has a remarkable ability to conjure and sustain a fluctuating tension that, within individual sentences and at the larger scale, produces its own narrative momentum.

The novel is divided evenly in two. In the first half, the narrator is having lunch in the financial district with Xavier, a mysterious young admirer, when she sees her husband, Tomas, enter the restaurant and leave without acknowledging her. At home that evening, neither husband nor wife addresses the incident directly, so it remains unclear what Tomas, a scholar who is supposed to be holed up writing in the apartment all day, was doing there, and whether he saw her and suspected an affair with the young man or not. We learn that, in the weeks prior, Xavier had sought out the narrator at the theater during rehearsals, claiming that she might be his biological mother, though she assured him this was impossible—she has never given birth to anyone. Xavier, whose motives are unknown, gets a job as assistant to the play’s director and ingratiates himself with her and Max, each of whom has begun to express concern, as previews draw near, about the quality of the narrator’s performance. The narrator receives a worrying text from Tomas, but the reader doesn’t learn what he wants to discuss.

In the novel’s second half, the play has opened and, though the narrator’s voice continues speaking as before, the reality it depicts has shifted: the narrator and her husband do have—have always had—a child, now a young adult, who returns home, leading to an increasingly dreamlike power struggle. Much of the action, in fact, acquires a dreamlike quality, as the narrator encounters frightening tableaux—“a fallen glass, a blotch of vivid red upon the carpet,” and her husband on all fours, “head lolling heavy from his neck”—and people reappear in subtly altered guises. (These moments are presented as being just as real as anything else in the novel, but they seem staged; it’s suggested that they may be scenes from a play that Xavier has written for the narrator, which she is now performing.) Throughout Audition, the sentences are sinuous, paratactic, reflecting the instability of the characters’ natures and the relations between them, allowing different possibilities to be held in tension before receding again. In the relationship between husband and wife, the ease and comfort nurtured over decades nestle beside insidious dangers always waiting to creep in: “Tomas was sitting in his favorite armchair with another drink, it occurred to me that we were on our way to becoming alcoholics.”

Though the narrator of Audition initially seems more forthcoming than Kitamura’s previous protagonists, her account soon begins to dismantle itself from within. We observe her mistrust of her own perceptions and recollections, sensing the effort of some sort of repression. At one point she considers her “alarmingly inconsistent” memory, comparing it to “clips spliced together and aged by way of a filter, none of it seem[ing] like the record of events that had actually taken place.” Replaying a moment with her husband and son, she realizes that Tomas “had wanted to protect him, and the force or person or event that he wanted to protect him from was me.” She begins to notice how certain harmless interactions of hers could look “vicious” from the outside. In these ways, the narrator comes to resemble a passive trickster, an odd fusion of the guarded, self-questioning protagonists of Kitamura’s past two novels with a more threatening, unpredictable figure, usually male, that she has previously portrayed only from without: a sort of id moving through the world, fomenting chaos, whose motivations are unexplored both on principle and because they are self-explanatory. In Kitamura’s earlier novels, expansionist greed and a lust for dominance were forces so common as to render motivation itself a kind of irrelevant fiction. In Audition, it doesn’t feel very consequential whether or not the narrator is more of a villain than she realizes. But Kitamura seems intent on giving a close study of how a person builds and defends her own character, exploring what it might be like inside the mind of someone who frightens others and chooses either to justify this or not to know it.

To what end, all this withholding? Kitamura’s project—its omnipresent paranoia and haunted, dissociative atmosphere—is recognizably that of someone who earned a Ph.D. from the London Consortium, a multidisciplinary graduate program that was a high-water mark for cultural studies and critical theory in the early Aughts, and who served as a creative consultant on the Slavoj Žižek documentary projects The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Academic fashions have changed over the past twenty years, but the terms and preoccupations of critical theory have invaded the cultural mainstream—much as an increasingly pervasive political unreality has perhaps rendered them harder to mock or misunderstand. Like Lerner’s Topeka School, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, Jenny Offill’s Weather, or Red Pill, by Kitamura’s husband, Hari Kunzru, Kitamura’s trilogy records the response of a consciousness regularly breached by forces beyond its control—a consciousness that must nonetheless hold or channel the guilt that floods the surrounding system. Her approach tends to be more austere than her peers’, formally and otherwise, focusing on the repeated effort to contain all this rather than the material that makes it in or out.

While Kitamura’s fiction invokes a recognizable dimension of presumably transhistorical human experience (the problem of other minds; how to know whether what we perceive is real), the contemporary specificity is evident. For many in the West, daily life involves a hundred acts of anguished denial: on the couch or subway trying to keep your child from seeing the phone screen, perhaps manufactured by children elsewhere, on which you watch yet other children you have paid (via taxes) to bomb. Intimacies, Kitamura’s most fully realized and rapturously received work so far, hammers this point home: “There are prisons and far worse all around us,” its narrator, a court interpreter at an international tribunal in The Hague, thinks in passing, after a night shift in a detention center at the edge of the city.

In New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below. People eating their sandwiches and sipping their cappuccinos, who had no idea of . . . the world in which they were living.

Here again is that inexpressive mode that Enelow identified in film performance, hiding a dark pool beneath; what can’t be acknowledged isn’t just an individual’s pain but the larger suffering that undergirds it. If you put Kitamura’s recent works into a time capsule, they would undeniably tell future readers something true about what it’s like to live now. Still, reading today, they can be unsatisfying—so much skill expended on re-creating one of the most familiar, sickening, relentless aspects of our shared experience.

Intimacies weaves Kitamura’s interest in passivity and performance into her most direct form of moral and political critique. Facilitating the court’s “high theatrics,” the narrator feels herself compromised in myriad small ways, disturbed by the reflexive empathy enforced by inhabiting and transmitting the speech of people who have perpetrated unthinkable atrocities. The corollary to the narrator’s recessive tendency—and her hesitation to perform the testimony of the génocidaires’ victims—is the idea that we should not seek to humanize those who commit monstrous acts by plumbing their supposed psychological depths. Everything you need to know about them is available in their words and actions. The truth of that is likewise manifest in the tribunal itself, a supposedly impartial institution that never attempts to bring U.S. leaders to trial for acts the whole world witnesses. The narrator emphasizes that it’s probably her status as a peripatetic, non-white outsider that makes her willing to acknowledge her own complicity: “I wasn’t one of them, I didn’t have it in me.”

More than any other contemporary anglophone novelist I can think of, Kitamura sets out to evoke the unbearable pressures on the mind and body of things we tolerate, don’t act on, and can’t allow ourselves to think about. Audition removes overt politics from this project, leaving an often mystifying study of just how much people willfully avoid knowing about the conditions of their lives. (Kitamura’s examination of the private workings of passive complicity and disavowal, along with the dismantled elements of noir and the first-person narration by translators or interpreters who must speak in voices not their own, is indebted to Javier Marías—to whom Xavier’s name seems to be a sly tribute.) Kitamura transmits her characters’ discomfort to her readers, denying us the relief of immersion: we can’t be where we are, but we aren’t taken anywhere else.

She hasn’t always worked this way. Her luminously claustrophobic debut novel, The Longshot (2009), set in the few days leading up to a mixed martial arts fight in Tijuana, Mexico, was an experiment in the opposite direction: utterly absorbing, transporting, and at the same time eerily ersatz. It follows the fighter Cal and his trainer, Riley, in their preparations for a rematch with Rivera, an undefeated champion who gave Cal his first big loss four years earlier, permanently altering his sense of himself. Kitamura, who trained as a classical ballet dancer in her youth, is skilled at conveying the sort of physical performance that yokes mind to body, that demands everything from a person. We know nothing of the characters’ experiences and thoughts beyond MMA. Her depictions of the fighters in motion are vivid and precise, and it is entirely through these—the account of their talents, their strategies, reflexes, and intuitions, what their bodies can do from moment to moment—that we gain our sense of their qualities as individuals, of their orientation in the world.

At the same time, these characters—their reactions, the arc of their struggles—are recognizable from every prior popular depiction of competitive sports, as if Kitamura had chosen to supersaturate her version, accentuating the element of drag, aware of appropriating this sweaty condensation of masculine fantasy. The sense of genre familiarity actually contrives to heighten the suspense and emotional impact for the reader; it elevates the material to tragedy, because our knowledge of what will happen infects the characters, too. They seem aware of being trapped inside the same old story, of being offered a chance to transcend their limitations that is no real chance at all. In that sense, The Longshot, too, forgoes illusion. As in all her works, the author’s performance is captivating despite insisting on its limits, its unreality.

With Audition, Kitamura seems to have reached some kind of end point, to have exhausted the possibilities of portraying characters caught in the awareness of their own false positions. In the performative dimension of life, she now finds a reminder of mortality, of how provisional and potentially fruitless one’s efforts are. Xavier, a doppelgänger who shares some of the narrator’s physical features and appears to have copied mannerisms from her stage and screen performances, forces her to see what is rote, vague, or manipulative in gestures she’s repeated too many times in too many different contexts.

Meeting him at an age when the profusion of possible lives that accompanies youth is narrowing (at least offstage), she seems to recognize in him an embodiment of one of those lives—a child she and Tomas didn’t have. She recalls a brief pregnancy that ended in miscarriage, during which the imaginative dimension of their marriage, the shared fantasy realm that sustains any couple, diverged. She remembers how she and Tomas performed for each other during those weeks, each holding back the most salient aspect of their experience. As her own mind struggled to make room for the idea of the baby, she picked up Tomas’s phone one day and discovered a pregnancy-tracking app he had downloaded.

It was like coming upon my husband dressed in another person’s clothes, I couldn’t reconcile the essential austerity of Tomas’s nature, the aesthetic precision of his taste, with the bouncing pea pods and cherries that danced across the screen . . .

Into this old, unacknowledged fissure in their relationship steps Xavier, somewhat alien, somewhat imaginary, but in a manner that suggests all children are—all families a fragile collusion that can be undone by any member. When he tells the narrator he is working for her director, saying he hadn’t wanted her to feel ambushed on finding him in the theater, she responds with an apparent non sequitur that is also, she thinks, “a kind of peace offering or confession”—an admission, perhaps, that what she has previously seen as “his personal delusion” is in fact a joint fantasy, a collaborative performance, as if each of them has, for their own private reasons, invented the other: “You can be entranced by an idea, I said, and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it.”

Losing track of the edge is her gift, her vocation. As she tells Xavier: “In some ways the part is only working if I lose sight of the shore.” Mulling over the degree to which a performer should intend, understand, and control her performance, she offers a story about another actor. She had agreed to work with this man, whom she had previously dismissed as lazy and overrated, on the basis of his revelatory turn in a film called Salvation, only to discover too late that this so-called performance had been no such thing. The painful, affecting turmoil and confusion he conveys is real, as he is losing his faculties and is groping around in each scene for the lines that have been hidden on scraps of paper around the set. Watching it again with this knowledge, Salvation is reduced for her to a “snuff film.”

“I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance,” she notes:

that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire. Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere.

In both art and life, Kitamura suggests, we rely on shared, protective illusions, on sustaining a level of denial without which we couldn’t continue to perform our roles. A person effectively alone, refusing to express or even to know what is most important about her own life—whether or not the reader feels a shudder of recognition, it’s unclear where the project can go from there.