Katie Kitamura’s Audition offers a careful use of language, an experimental structure, a non-linear storyline, a Sliding Doors parlor trick and a mysterious and unsettling storyline, all in a spare 190 page package. The book explores themes like identity as performance, the unknowability of others, shifting personal and professional power dynamics, and how honesty and intimacy in a marriage can be slippery.
Phew. If your book club is anything like the reviews on Goodreads, you are going to have a whopper of the conversation. You can get started with your loved it/hated it conversation using these Audition book club questions. As usual, I’ve got a synopsis, 10 book club questions and selected (and very binary) reviews.
Then scroll to the end, because I’m also recommending some follow-up books that touch on similar themes and settings.
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Synopsis for Audition
(We always chose to provide the publisher synopsis because we feel that it’s worthwhile to discuss whether the official book description actually squared with your experience of the book.)
Audition, Katie Kitamura
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
Book Club Questions for Audition
These questions have been tailored to this book’s specific reading experience, but if you want more ideas, we also have an article with 101 generic book club questions.
- The reviews on this book were very binary (examples below), eliciting loved it/hated it responses. Rate the book on a scale of 1-10. 10 is– “I loved this clever experimental book. I liked the metafiction of identity and performance, I didn’t always understand where it was going but I loved getting there” and 1 is– “this book made no sense, the pacing was glacial, I hated everyone and I’m really glad it was only 190 pages”.
- Discuss the Sliding Doors-style shift between Part I and Part II. Did Part I set you up for Part II? Did you prefer (or dislike) one section over another?
- A number of times, the un-named main character (I’ll call her, Her) hints at Her race, without actually labeling it. What was Kitamura saying with those passages? Was it a commentary on changing times or the vicissitudes of Hollywood culture? Or was it was it part of the reoccurring theme of identity and “acting the part”?
- “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 than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
One could argue that with Audition, there was the narrative inside Her head and then a different narrative showing what was actually happening around Her. Did you find Her internal narrative true to the events surrounding her? - Her is acutely aware of her performative nature. She also sees Xavier’s gestures and mannerisms as not only performative but imitative of her. Was he really doing that? Was she imagining it?
- So much is unsaid between she in Tomas. In part I it was Her affairs and their feelings about the second pregnancy. In part II it was Her resentment that Xavier has moved back in and the takeover that his girlfriend orchestrated. Was this a particular gulf between these two characters? Or do all long-term marriages develop a dynamic like that?
- Her is always on the lookout for how others are reacting when she and Xavier are together. She believes that they’re making assumptions about the relationship. Do you think they were judging, or was she simply projecting her own feelings and anxieties upon perfect strangers?
- There are no quotation marks in the dialogue. Did you notice? Does it matter?
- The book presents as a character study that explores themes of identity, how we see ourselves and others, and how we are perceived. Are we all just playing a part? Is all of life an audition?
- “As for Xavier, I no longer knew what he was to me, or what I was to him. We had been playing parts, and for a period-for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person-the mechanism had held. But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse. It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.”
Have you experienced this sort of break in your family or friend relationships? Have you found that the living the fiction can only go on for so long before something snaps?
Selected Reviews for Audition
(Use these selected Goodreads reviews to compare with your own experience of the book. Do you agree or disagree with the reviews?)
“This is a dizzying, disturbing piece of writing that is theoretically informed but which also is self-referential enough to be able to stand alone. It deliberately destructs a linear storyline with two parts – or acts? – that pull in different directions in terms of narrative logic but which cohere in abstract and thematic ways. […] I can imagine this book being frustrating to readers who want a logical exposition and nineteenth century realism: instead this plays in that postmodern space of subjectivity and relativity, where all self is a series of performances and there is no such thing as ‘authenticity’.”
“I was contemplating giving it three stars for being quite clever, but the last fifty pages just went completely off the rails. Up until that point, I had felt I somewhat understood the novel structurally and thematically, even if I did not necessarily enjoy it, but then the narrative dissolved into what, in parts, read like random chaos.”
“Everyone in the novel is playing a part, creating scenes of unraveling mystery that cast doubt about what motives and actions are real and which are performative masks. Kitamura’s prose is spare, piercing and exploratory. It delivers thoughts in sentences that sometimes run on while abruptly veering in different directions and time frames. The result is an aura of psychological uncertainty and tension as relations between the narrator, her husband Tomas and Xavier morph in mood and roles throughout. […] The author does not offer solutions. Instead, she leaves readers embroiled in the mysteries confronting our protagonists. Each reader might have a different solution. Many will be enriched for having engaged in the search.”
“Listen, I like novels that are experimental and meta, but – unpopular opinion! – the new Kitamura just doesn’t have enough meat on the bone. […] Nothing much happens, except vibes and an actress acting all the way through her existence. It didn’t captivate me, and I mainly pulled through because Kitamura’s language and scene composition are of course first class.”
“Having read two of her previous works—one I liked, the other not—I can see that she prioritizes style over substance. Sometimes this works for me, especially when the style enhances the tensions, moods, and themes of a story. Other times, well, it feels like it feels like pure aesthetic posturing, an exercise in style—elegant, but ultimately empty. Audition, sadly, isn’t quite as clever as it seems to think it is, particularly in its exploration of performance, selfhood, and the blurring of roles and identities.”
What to Read After Audition
Here are a few of my discussion guides that touch on some of the elements from Audition. Each one has a non-spoiler synopsis toward the top with links to Amazon reviews and pricing.
- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: Identity and Hollywood.
- Cursed Daughters: Seriously damaging family secrets.
- Yellowface: All of you people are awful, but also kinda interesting.
- Small Things Like These: Booker winner, slim volume and perfect prose.
Fates & Furies, Lauren Groff
Here’s one if you’d like another marriage with unspoken resentments, a powder keg, and a lit fuse.
Lotto, a sunny young actor raised by an evangelistic mermaid impersonator, resolves to give up his womanizing ways when he meets the brilliant and aloof Mathilde at college. A few weeks later, the couple is married. Friends (and frenemies) envy Lotto and Mathilde for their blossoming lives, but below the surface, their marriage is intricately shaded with less glamorous secrets, needs, and resentments. So many resentments.
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, Kathleen Rooney
This is a good fit if you like NYC as a evocative setting but would like a main character who’s more confident with where she’s ended up in life.
The action in this book takes place over one New Years Eve as octogenarian Lillian walks the length of Manhattan, narrating the highs and lows of her life. She was a working woman before her time, a complicated character, a reluctant mother and a woman who takes no guff.
This was one of my favorite reads in the year that I read it. I appreciated the book’s lack of stereotyping and the Manhattan setting made me want to visit NYC again.
Theo of Golden, Allen Levi
Maybe you’re OK with people who aren’t as they seem, but you need a more traditional story structure…and maybe more likeable characters…and maybe some kindness? Here you go!
When the mysterious Theo lands in Golden, he’s struck by a series of portraits hanging on the wall at the local coffeeshop. They’ve been lovingly created by a local artist and feature people who now or once lived in Golden. They’re also for sale. So, Theo decides to purchase the portraits one at a time, find the people behind the likeness, and gift them their portrait.
That alone makes the book interesting. But Theo’s generosity, his intriguing backstory and his ability to befriend and then bring together the townspeople is really what makes the book. It’s beautifully written and beyond heartwarming. And it will make you want to think up your own generosity project.
Read this one for book club and use this Theo of Golden discussion guide.
Recent Contemporary Fiction Guides
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My Friends Book Club Questions and Discussion Guide
Audition Book Club Questions and Discussion Guide
