Mountain Devil

Recommend: No

Katie Kitamura has long been interested in performance. The first novel of hers that I read was A Separation. It was a novel focused on clearing an escape path from the fresh wreckage of a marriage, while still acting as though the confines of that relationship were still standing for the benefit of close family. I’ve not yet read her most famous novel, Intimacies. Though I do know it’s concerned with the act of translation, which is itself a performance – to translate is to take something not real to the self and speak it as though it is.

Audition takes things up a notch. Everything in this novel is woven from the fabric of performance. Kitamura is constantly forcing you to consider what constitutes playing a part. The theme is present from the very beginning. The title, Audition, begs the question: for what exactly are we auditioning? By the end, I was convinced that there is no difference between acting and living, such that the question became: when in life are we not auditioning?

The novel has a very clear two part structure.

At the beginning of the first part, Kitamura walks us into a tense lunch between the (unnamed) main character and a young man called Xaiver. There’s a palpitating current running between the two. The unnamed narrator is an actress in her late forties who found great success years ago and is now preparing a theatre production that is likely to be a hit. Xaiver is in his early twenties. The relationship between the two is unnerving in its lack of definition. They have met before but the caution in which they approach each other suggests the two have not known each other long. The texture of the meeting is rough, uncertain and intoxicating. The question of who Xaiver is to the narrator is the tension of the first half of the Audition.

Then the second half turns the premise of the first, spins it in circles, and then opens its eyes again to a disoriented familiarity. To say anything more would spoil the conceit of the novel.

There’s a challenge from Kitamura the whole way through to relate the first half to the second. You must make conclusions through subtle recurrences of themes from the first half in order to construct the plot that runs through the whole.

The two halves simply cannot coexist though. There is a physical contradiction that demands we accept that one must be a fabrication, the other true. As we move through the second half, it becomes plausible that in fact the first half could be the performance and the second half the truth. By the end of the book, there’s no resolution for this central question of what is true and what is not. The unnamed actress, narrator of both halves, is never complete, no matter what half you as the reader choose to believe is reality. What the narrator has in the second half is presumably the deep, unsaid dream of the narrator in the first half. But then the narrator of the second half, in her different circumstances, cannot maintain the stability and the intimacies of the narrator of the first half.

Kitamura presents us with a hellish duality of lack, and suggests in every person there is an unsatisfied yearning that possesses us but cannot be realised. We can dedicate our whole lives to fulfilling that desire only for it to shapeshift into something new just when we think we are able to reach it. If we were ever to find the dream version of our lives (love, success, family), we’d arrive there only to be confronted with another hollow emptiness that demands to be filled. Our performance of happiness is therefore never-ending. We are all made up of powerful wants that are inherently contradictory. There are two studied in this novel, via the opposing halves. The first is that a successful career doesn’t allow time for the development of family connections. The second is that an honest romantic relationship requires a maturity that refuses the presence of children. Society has ensured that pursuit of one want necessarily limits pursuit of the rest. Even if you could graduate into the imagined better half of your life, Kitamura’s thesis is that you won’t find peace. You’d only be doomed to act out your new part, patching over with performance, both outwardly and inwardly directed, the new, unavoidable absence created by this refreshed context. There is no whole.

Ultimately, it was the ambiguity in the plot that didn’t sit right with me. Every sentence is impeccable, and characters are unfussy and convincingly drawn. The central question – where does a performance start and end – was expertly asked. I just got the sense Kitamura was so entranced in the concept of a performance that she too lost track of what was real in the plot and what was not. There’s a grand idea here, so close to being realised. But it just needs to be pieced together a little bit more for the reader. There’s an elegance in saying less rather than more but there are things that still need to be said in order to be understood.

What was it all about? Artifice. The novel depicts how if we tire of playing one role in society, all that happens is we are forced to play another. I just wish I knew what the precise origins of that commentary were – this missing depth in the plot was what prevented Audition from being a Recommendation.