Abstract Art

Audition’s lack of novelistic detail is both a strength and a weakness.

- BOOKS / EMMA ALPERN

IN NOVELS ABOUT acting, what happens onstage tends to really matter. A good portion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park revolves around a raunchy amateur version of Lovers’ Vows that disturbs hopelessly uptight Fanny Price; more recently, there’s been the West Bank production of Hamlet in Isabella Hammad’s 2023 novel, Enter Ghost, and the teenagers’ dangerous improvisations in Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. In all these books, the details of performance and plot are key to understanding the backstage action, working like a built-in allegory that the characters can step right into and inhabit. So it’s notable that the production at the center of Katie Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, is barely described at all. We don’t know the plotline. We don’t know the setting. We don’t know anything about the characters or the cast. There are a few hints and plenty of actorly emotion, but mostly the play, a star vehicle for the nameless main character, is an empty space.

Kitamura has been practicing such sleight of hand for a while. The author, who has a Ph.D. in American literature, teaches creative writing at NYU—and in many ways, she’s a writer’s writer, focused on craft, well reviewed, and, in 2021, long-listed for the National Book Award. Her second novel, 2012’s Gone to the Forest, is about a farm in an unidentified colonial territory, a purposely vague mash-up of African, Asian, and South American signifiers. In her next book, A Separation, a woman’s estranged husband goes missing; she flies to Greece to track him down, but he remains tantalizingly out of reach. In her most recent work, 2021’s Intimacies, the narrator translates for an accused warlord from an unnamed country for an international court in the Hague.