There is an eeriness to great acting. Studied movements take on life; a living other emerges. Bad acting achieves no such uncanniness. Excessively self-conscious, the failing actor never dissolves into their role. We watch them watching themselves act.
Although we rarely see her on stage, the actor narrating Audition, Katie Kitamura’s unnerving, desperately tense fifth novel, never stops watching herself perform. Even passing, offhand phrases seem to fray under the strain of an unsustainable self-awareness. “You might think that people wondered how we did it,” she says, describing the comfortable Manhattan lifestyle she shares with her husband. The perspectives are tortuous, unmanageable. Who is this “you” that might imagine their way into the opinions of unseen others? As the novel progresses, these gazes are experienced as social roles both longed for and resisted. “How many times had I been told how much it meant to some person or another, seeingsomeone who looked like meon stage or on screen,” she says, one of many moments in the novel in which ethnicity is both present and absent at once: acknowledged, but never explicitly named.
The novel’s opening pages establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant. Narrowing her gaze to the terrain of the body, she invests even the solicitations of a waiter with portentous significance: “He inclined his head and held the door open, and because of that small courtesy – an invitation or injunction to enter – I went inside.”
Waiting at the table is a young man, Xavier, self-assured and faintly discomfiting. The meeting is edgy and awkward, rendered in a tapestry of small gestures. Initially, we wonder if we are being subjected to the prose equivalent of bad acting: a surfeit of fussy movement, signifying nothing – an impression heightened by the stumbling gait of the narrator’s run-on sentences.
But admirers of Kitamura’s previous novel,Intimacies, will recall the taut discipline of that book’s prose, and trust that, here, the language has been loosened by design. Sure enough, when the churn of movement and syntax is disrupted – appropriately, by the smallest of gestures – a deeper existential dread emerges. Xavier sits back, exhales. The narrator, with a sense of shock, recognises the movement as her own, “lifted from my films, my stage performances, and copied without shame. A piece of me, on the body of a stranger.” Xavier has studied her, she believes, then performed her back to herself.
Later, Xavier repeats the movement, and a further layer of meaning is added. It is, we learn, a gesture the narrator has disowned, a tic she fell back on “when I did not know how to work my way out of a scene, when I was uncertain of what was happening with a character at a particular moment”.
Xavier’s appropriated mannerism lays bare the artifice of the narrator’s performance, trapping her in her own self-consciousness. In doing so, it exposes in turn the artifice of her narration – of the veryactof narration. The tissue of internal coherence has been rent. Reality, fragile bothin terms of the narrator’s psyche and the novel’s self-reflective structure, cannot hold.
Auditionis a novel of mirrored halves, angled towards an absent centre. In the first, Xavier tells the narrator that he believes himself to be her abandoned son – something she makes clear is impossible. In the second, heisher son, or, at least, he is willingly performing that role. In the first half, the narrator recalls with sadness her affairs, after a miscarriage. In the second, it is her husband who has strayed. It’s not so much a question of which is real; this is a novel about the suspension of disbelief necessary for life to be tolerable at all.
Key to these coexisting realities is a mysterious central scene in the play the actor is to perform – the “black box” that changes the audience’s entire understanding of the character. In the novel’s first half, she is rehearsing it, and struggling. In the second, she has mastered it – the play is an unqualified success. This scene is never described. Instead, the narrator details what she finds within it: a realm of “infinite contingency”, “wholly private”, in which, briefly, she is able to locate a “single, unified self”.
Critically, this enigmatic scene may not contain any meaning of its own. Much like the overused gesture appropriated by Xavier, it is revealed to be little more than a creative device, a strategy deployed in the face of uncertainty. Discussing it during a rehearsal, the narrator realises that the playwright has “no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play … the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder”. That the narrator finds such freedom, such self-coherence, suchsensein this scene only after she has discovered inside it no such sense or meaningis key to this novel’s deeply radical thesis. It is into the unwritten, into meaning’s absence, that we are free to project meaning of our own.
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By Audition’s end we are in the darkest black box of all: the catastrophe that results when the self’s illusory nature is laid bare. Just as the mirage of a character arises from the coherence of an actor’s gestures, so from the false coherence of the self arises the mirage we mistake for a world. When the self is unmasked as empty, the world it has projected collapses, and we see ourselves for what we are: actors on a bare stage, performing scenes without meaning, for an audience who were never there.
Most novels shrink from the vertiginous depths of this absence; to accept it is to allow to disintegrate the basic precepts of the novelistic form: stability of character, dependability of meaning, linearity of event. Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition nonetheless thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life.
Audition by Katie Kitamura is published by Fern (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.