A woman meets a man half her age at a sleek Manhattan restaurant for lunch. Is he her lover or her son? If the former, then you might expect her to wield the power, like the character of Mrs. Robinson in 鈥淭he Graduate,鈥� Mike Nichols鈥� 1967 film about a young man who has an affair with one of his parents鈥� friends. If the latter, then you might expect the young man, Xavier, to wield the power because youth outshines age and parents, for the most part, are willing to go to almost any length to make their kids happy.
In her latest novel, 鈥淎udition,鈥� exploits all the tension and ambiguity inherent in that opening scene to craft a short, propulsive novel that suggests that at work and in life, we are constantly trying out roles and making it up as we go along. Or, to quote , 鈥淎ll the world鈥檚 a stage, and all the men and women merely players.鈥�
鈥淎udition鈥� features an unnamed female narrator, an actor of some renown, in rehearsals for a difficult new play. When she is not on stage, she lives a quiet life in the West Village with her art historian husband, Tomas. Halfway through the novel, everything changes. The relationships between her, Xavier and Tomas are turned upside down in head-spinning fashion like the figure/ground illusion known as Rubin鈥檚 vase. Look at the picture one way, and it is a container for flowers; look at it another way, and it is the silhouettes of two heads facing each other.
Kitamura鈥檚 two previous novels also featured unnamed female protagonists whose work was bound up with interpretation: in 鈥淚ntimacies,鈥� a female interpreter at the Hague, and in 鈥淎 Separation,鈥� a translator. In this book she evokes a stylish city built out of glass, a sort of Mastercard ad where people have personal assistants and nibble on charcuterie trays in tastefully furnished apartments.
In this facsimile of New York, which does not include disheveled people sleeping on the street or garbage spilling out of trash cans, Kitamura does a good job of creating a sense of the uncanny and feeling of dread. Reality is unstable; nothing is as it seems.
The cleverly constructed plot ends with the narrator wrestling with big, abstract ideas including the possibility that a family is nothing more than a 鈥渟hared delusion, a mutual construction,鈥� a group of actors performing their parts.
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AP book reviews:
Ann Levin, The Associated Press
