I found this novel because I’ve become interested in the “weird girl” sub-genre of literary fiction and Audition by Katie Kitamura was suggested by Forbes as one of the best of 2025. Weird girl lit usually features a young woman who “embraces her alienation from the world.”  

Having been set up in my expectations, I was disappointed to find that the female (unnamed) narrator of Audition is not weird.  But like so many New York actresses, she is neurotic. Her life, husband, son, friends and New York apartment all fit very neatly within the stereotype of a female in theater. Her struggles are the garden-variety domestic and work-related kind. She is worried about turning fifty; she and her husband have grown apart; their adult son moves back into their small apartment.  What is unusual (but not weirdly cool) about the narrator is the way she narrates, in excruciating detail, all the intentions and unexpressed feelings of other people.  She suspiciously reads the minds of her husband and son, even a passing waiter or strangers sitting at an opposite table. Here is the opening scene:

The host asked if I had a reservation. I said that I was meeting someone and indicated the young man seated at the back of the restaurant. Xavier. It occurred to me that the host must have been the person to seat him at the inhospitable table, and I saw a flicker of surprise cross his features as I pointed. He looked quickly from my face to my coat to my jewelry. It was my age, above all. That was the thing that confounded him. He gave a tight smile and asked me to please follow him. 

Kitamura writes in the close first-person.  If I were her editor, I would have found myself asking, Have you considered using the omniscient point-of-view?  

But let me get to what I liked about this novel.  The narrator is rehearsing for a play and the structure of that play serves as a device for the way the novel is organized.  In the play, the lead character has one type of disposition in part one, then she transforms in a pivotal scene, effectively becoming someone new. The playwright, our narrator muses, probably got bored with the first representation of the character and abandoned her for a better one. 

This pretty much defines what the novel does.  In part one, the narrator meets a young man Xavier who thinks she is his biological mother who gave him up for adoption.  That’s who she is meeting for a second time in the above quoted scene (thus, all the sexual tension is a rather dishonest device to hook the reader).  

In part two, the author abandons that conflict and the story marches on (the actress continues in her same play, etc) except that now Xavier is her actual son who is moving back in after a few years at college.  

Let me clarify that I did not like that the novelist pulled the rug out from under her initial story.  I liked that the fault of the play told us how to judge the novel.  Other novelists have successfully played the “it’s not real” trick. Kate Atkinson in A God in Ruins, reveals in the end that whole beautiful family memoir is false because the patriarch actually went down in the North Sea in WW2 and never even had children.  Or in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the young would-be novelist writes the happy story that might have been, had she not wrongly accused her sister’s lover of rape. In both instances, the “it’s not true” reversal serves a purpose of the plot.  

Audition is “psychological fiction.”  I never much cared for psychology.  I’m more of a philosophy reader.  Psychology feels too much like sitting at the kitchen table with a next-door neighbor, who goes on and on and on about what he said and what she said, and what that all likely means.  

This objectively disjointed novel reads like a collection of short stories that were shoehorned into a single narrative. In addition, many of the narrator’s internal musings—on abortion, on infidelity, on motherhood—felt like retread personal essays torn from the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, whose editorial team had sanitized all the personal details to make the opinions more relatable.

There are a few good lines here there and a metaphor or two that deserved to be underlined. I duly noted those.  And there is one paragraph in the middle of the book that justifies its existence.  It succinctly captures the artistic experience of stage performance:  

As soon as I arrive at the theater, I could not wait to be inside the scene.  I anticipated the music cue, the pool of light emerging on the near darkness of the stage. I longed for it in a way that was almost carnal. When I breathed in and stepped forward into the light, countless paths seemed to unfurl before me, forking and then forking again, so that I was dazzled each time by the scene’s infinite contingency, the range of possibility laid out in front of me. From that point, for a period of four minutes and thirty-odd seconds, I explored the scene’s terrain. The experience felt wholly private, even though I was onstage. It was not that I forgot about the audience or the parameters and the construction of the set. It was that here, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self. Did this happen only in those few minutes on that stage and nowhere else? It felt that way. Although every beat of the scene was tightly scripted, I felt as if I had an infinite amount of time, I moved at my leisure. And while I hit my marks and cues, never deviating from the script, I was not in control of what took place, there was an alchemical process by which the scene unfold, mysterious even to me and [the playwright]. In those moments, I was in communion with something, some force that was larger than myself and the scope of my ordinary life. 

The idea of the novel is that everybody is constantly auditioning for their roles in life, even the roles of mother or son.  That strikes me as neither profound nor particularly true. Kitamura should have written Performance instead.  

—V. N. Alexander, author of The Girlie Playhouse, forthcoming in 2026