“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous that you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.” (38)
First up in the 2025 Booker 101 is a slim slice of metafiction in Katie Kitamura’s Audition. Understandably divisive, the novel with its unnamed 49-year-old actress of a narrator, presents two different realities along the same timeline with not gap or repetition; the only significant change is motherhood. There’s a lot of discussion, and a lot more room for it, regarding the two sections and how they work together toward the endgame. There’s also a lot of room for discussion about what the endgame actually is. Spoiler – the endgame is whatever the reader walks away with.
Actual spoilers will follow.
For me, part two signifies the narrator assuming the role of “mother” for purposes of “bridging the gap” in the play she’s acting in; it’s method acting, but she’s been playing a part for so long, she isn’t quite sure where she starts and the role ends. A deeper dive would say this type of method acting is also her way of dealing with her husband’s possible infidelity and absolute unhappiness, (of note, he’s unhappy in both “realities”), and her own varied emotions regarding both the abortion and miscarriage. (How she describes the miscarriage – “I had briefly borne death in my body…” is both a quiet moment and a visceral scream of writing that truly marks the writing style of the novel as a whole.)
Two things that solidify in my mind that Part Two is intended to be essentially “role play” – the gaps in the narrator’s memory (she only remembers what is necessary to move the “action” forward or build her character) and the change of the play’s title. In part one, the play is “The Opposite Shore” and it is “Rivers” in part two. One is terra firma and the other is flowing, inconsistent and unpredictable waters – just like the sections.
Some continued threads that I enjoyed – the scarf she wears in part one that becomes Xavier’s in part two, and the continued use of pastries albeit with different motives.
I think Kitamura wrote herself into the novel not as the narrator but as Max, who got bored with a character and wrote an entirely new scene with a new character where the narrator has to “bridge the gap” between the two.
Short story long, all the world is a stage and Audition drips with Booker-type.
Booker 1 of 13
*There is additional content on Instagram for each of the longlisted books if you want to check that out! My final thoughts will be posted here as well, but if you want to see the cover discussion or some quick and dirty facts, head over there!
A Girl Named Tommi 