Told from the evocative but terse perspective of an unnamed, middle-aged actress, Katie Kitamura’s latest novel “Audition” interrogates the performative and indefinite aspects of interpersonal relationships and identity. “Audition” was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, and Kitamura came to speak at both the UCLA Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room and the Hammer Museum on February 19, 2026 in conversation with UCLA English Professor and author Mona Simpson.
Through the first half of the novel, the narrator meets and gets to know a young college student, Xavier, while rehearsing for a new play. From their first interaction, Kitamura subverts the audience’s expectations by initially suggesting their lunch meeting is romantic before revealing that Xavier believes himself to be the narrator’s son. This drastic shift in the reader’s framing of their relationship unveils the central premise of the novel, which revolves around a seamless break in reality at the halfway point, before which Xavier cannot be the narrator’s son and after which, without explanation or reasoning, Xavier is the narrator’s son.
The ambiguity of the “truth” behind the logic of “Audition” is furthered by the meta connections between the novel and the events within it—such as the fact that the new play the narrator is rehearsing in the first half of the novel also has a clean break in the middle to join two otherwise unconnected scenes—and Kitamura leaves the explanation as to this break and the disparate halves up to the reader’s interpretation. Perhaps the narrator suffers a psychological breakdown, or is struggling with dementia, paralleling the diagnosis of an actor the narrator worked with in the novel. Or perhaps the events of one of the halves are being acted out by the narrator herself, possibly part of a play written by Xavier, creating yet another level of fictionality within the story.
The deliberate lack of clarity as to which reality is real reflects “Audition”’s central themes and questions: namely, the impossibility of knowing what other people are truly thinking and feeling and the disparities between how people perceive themselves; how they perform, deliberately or inadvertently, for others; and how other people perceive them. Beyond the scope of the novel itself, Kitamura’s premise invokes the broader notion of reliability and suggests that all narrators are in some ways unreliable because their experiences and biases necessarily pervade what they observe and how they reflect on their environment. Even more broadly, reality is subjective, and our own individual perceptions exist within the nebulous space of uncertainty that “Audition” explores so deftly.
Visual Credit: Florin
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