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Before I became a journalist, I got a Ph.D. in Russian literature. I don’t miss academia, but I do miss my Moscow “field work”: gypsy cabs, Georgian wine, politically subversive theatre, cosmonaut sleeping pills, flirting with “the enemy,” etc. The thing I loved most about living in a foreign country was how much quieter my mind became. I had to mute my internal English monologue so that Russian could find a way in. It made shutting up feel glamorous, like I was some mysterious, silent woman in a spy movie.
The only way I can get back to that headspace now—especially now—is by reading the work of the novelist Katie Kitamura. I was first pulled into her precise but sticky web of language and moral ambiguity by “A Separation” (2017) and “Intimacies” (2021), a pair of novels narrated by cool, reserved women, elegantly adrift in foreign countries. In “A Separation,” a literary translator based in London travels to Greece to look for her estranged husband, who has gone missing while researching a book on professional mourners: women who train to vocalize the pain of relatives stunned into silence by grief. “Intimacies” is the story of a woman tasked with doing exactly that at the highest level—as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Her pauses, inflections, and hesitations when interpreting for victims of genocide are all counted among the evidence.
Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour
Jennifer Wilson talks with Katie Kitamura.
Kitamura is from California, and her new novel, “Audition,” is her first set on U.S. soil, but it’s still about a woman speaking words that aren’t quite her own. The main character is a married, middle-aged actress in New York City—Kitamura’s third unnamed narrator in a row—who’s preparing to star in a play called “The Opposite Shore.” She’s struggling to interpret a scene when a very attractive, much younger man named Xavier, himself an aspiring playwright, walks into the theatre and breaks open the plot of her life. “Audition” is almost two stories in one; the characters get rearranged for Act II in a way that upends our sense of the novel’s beginning, middle, and end. The effect is that this drama of male interference never quite concludes—a bit of realism Kitamura renders through the surreal.
I talked to Kitamura about absent love interests, the pleasures of the workplace novel, and why she’s drawn to female protagonists who like to turn down the volume on their own voices. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
“Audition” begins with the protagonist meeting Xavier for lunch, and it’s this long, extended scene where the two say very little to each other. In fact, most of the action takes place in glances, including glances shot their way by another diner and the waiter. There’s this feeling that everyone in the restaurant is trying to parse the texture of this relationship. Are they lovers? Are they mother and son? We as readers are likewise trying to gauge it, like, What does this restaurant choice mean? Is this a date? We’re really primed by this first scene to interpret the rest of the novel as being about interpretation on some level.
The first scene is quite important to the novel because the pair at the heart of the novel, the narrator and this younger man, become an object that is looked at by many different people, all of them interpreting the nature of their relationship differently. I’m very preoccupied by interpretation. It’s been a theme in the last three novels. I had a central character who is a translator, one who is an interpreter, and then this character who is an actor interpreting parts, interpreting this new play and struggling. Interpretation is at the heart of this novel in a funny way—even more than in my last novel, where the character is literally a simultaneous interpreter.
It’s interesting that you say that this novel is more about interpretation than your previous one, because there’s almost more about acting in “Intimacies” than there is in “Audition,” where the main character is an actress. The protagonist of “Intimacies” talks about how much of her job involves inflection and mimicry. She describes simultaneous interpretation as a performance, and the courtroom as a stage where everyone—the attorneys, the witnesses—has a role to play.
I’m drawn to characters, in particular female characters, who speak the words of other people. I’m interested in passivity. And that goes a little bit against the grain of what we’re told to look for in fiction. I teach creative writing, and in workshop, if there is a character who the group feels doesn’t have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character, as if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms. Of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. We operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency, but in reality, our choices are quite constricted.
So I’m interested in depicting characters who maybe understand that passivity a little bit more than other people might, and who are trying to grapple with what that means.
In “Intimacies,” I would say that the narrator, in the course of the novel, comes to wonder at what point passivity becomes a kind of complicity. Is she implicated, as a simultaneous interpreter at a war-crimes tribunal, in the institutional activity of the room where she works? I think in this novel, in “Audition,” you have somebody who’s very clearly getting a sense that the parts she’s being given to play are insufficient. I refer to “parts” both in theatre and in life; she’s always playing a part that somebody else has handed to her.
Speaking of role-play, I was really struck by the breakfast routine her husband has imposed on her. So her husband, Tomas, learned at an earlier point in their marriage that she had begun to stray, and he makes her atone by setting the breakfast table every morning with coffee and pastries from a nearby café—and the number of pastries starts to multiply. As the novel goes on, it becomes almost surreal and a little grotesque, this abundance of danishes every morning.
I hate breakfast. I never eat breakfast. I have a very contested relationship with breakfast. I kind of don’t understand the point of it. I just want to be able to get up and get on with my day with just liquid caffeine in my system.
The novel in general has quite a reduced palette—like, it’s not a novel in which the physical reality of the world is elaborated upon at length. There’s a handful of objects, and I always knew that I had to make the objects do a lot of work, that they would be objects that would appear in the first half of the novel and then again in the second half of the novel with a different set of connotations and a different set of meanings. And so I wanted the pastries to be more than pastries in some way. I wanted them to feel slightly sinister, you know, that they keep reappearing and there’s always too many of them. The husband never confronts the narrator about her extramarital affairs, but in a supremely passive-aggressive way he creates this ritual that she submits to that is deliberately mundane and bourgeois. It’s unbelievably boring, but that’s the point: she has committed herself to the marriage again through this act.
How long had you been thinking about acting as a potential subject for a novel?
I tend to sit with an idea for an embarrassingly long amount of time. I had the idea for “Audition” before I started writing “Intimacies,” but I couldn’t quite see my way into the material. I think what happened between writing “Intimacies” and writing “Audition” is that I really came to see the degree to which performance is present in our day-to-day lives—whether the parts are mother and daughter, or partners, or student and teacher, even now as we’re talking to each other. There are all these parts that we play every single day, and they come with quite prescriptive scripts. The thing that struck me when I was thinking about “Audition” is how seamlessly we flip between parts almost without being aware of it. So, for example, I can be talking to my husband about something, and I will be using a certain vocabulary and a certain way of speaking, and then my children can come in and, literally, my voice will almost go up half an octave. The vocabulary changes completely. It’s bizarre—and yet that is how the vast majority of people go through their day. I think in “Audition” the central character is very much aware of it. She sees where those cracks are. And at a certain point, she can no longer paper over them.
Many of your previous novels read like plays to me, in the sense that many chapters unfold in single locations, in enclosed spaces. I really think of your previous novels in terms of my favorite “scenes”: the Mauritshuis art-museum scene from “Intimacies,” the long dinner scene between the wife and her husband’s mistress at the Greek resort in “A Separation.” And now you finally have arrived at a play! How much did you think about the play within “Audition,” which is called “The Opposite Shore”? We don’t get much detail about it other than there’s a scene in the middle that the narrator is struggling to interpret, until she finally cracks it—which leads us to Part II of “Audition.”
I love writing set pieces. That’s the space where I’m really comfortable, and I feel most relaxed as a writer. It’s actually all the interstitial connective tissue that you have to do between the set pieces that I find the most the most taxing. I always read plays before I start writing a novel. I always read Ibsen and Pinter. There’s something about the pressure cooker of a play—these people being in a contained setting that is really appealing to me in fictional terms. I knew that I did not want to write a play within a novel, which I think is a difficult form. The plot of the play was not particularly important. What was important was how it was acting upon the central character in terms of destabilizing her in some fundamental way. I wanted “The Opposite Shore” to be a kind of black box in the middle of the book, for the character to go into that scene and then come out of it as a different character. That is the structure of the novel as well.
Why did you choose to show her acting for the stage rather than for film or TV?
I’m really preoccupied with these physical spaces that are clearly demarcated and that have a great deal of artifice in the demarcation, whether it is a boxing ring or a courtroom or the space of a stage. At the same time, something real happens in all of those spaces. It comes quite close to the sublime. It’s an extraordinary power and it derives that power not despite, but because of the artifice, because we all go in there and we say, We know this is fake, but we are going to make the decision to believe. When you choose to believe, things are incredibly powerful.
To what extent is this a novel about middle age? That scene in the middle of the play that the narrator can’t seem to get right—it’s supposed to be one of a breakthrough, marking the transition to the titular Opposite Shore. She’s struggling so much with it that she becomes convinced the playwright just got bored of her character and wished she could start over.
There are two narratives of creative development in the novel. There is the development of the younger man, who has a very standard coming-of-age story. In the beginning, he seems to not know exactly what he’s doing, and by the end, he has emerged as an artist. That is a narrative that I think we’re very familiar with. We understand the shape of that. The narrative that is much less clear, even now, is a narrative of what happens to a woman, particularly in the middle of her life, which is astonishing to me.
One thing that struck me about “Intimacies” is that the main character is explicitly not a young woman; she is in her mid-to-late thirties. However, in a lot of descriptions of the novel, she was described as a young woman who moves to the Hague to start her life. That was really interesting to me, because it was almost as if story and narrative only happened to the young, as if the narrative of discovery was something that belonged to the young—which we know is not true. In this novel, we have a character who is certainly on a passage of discovery, but the narrative is not preëstablished in the same way. She’s not following something by rote, and so in a lot of ways, I think that’s why it felt right for me for the narrative to fracture in a lot of ways, and for there to be multiple possibilities that she might be exploring—whereas the narrative for the younger character, this young man, is much more linear.
While we’re discussing structure, I wanted to ask about the husband character, Tomas. He’s an art critic working on an essay about Czech Cubism. Why Czech Cubism? I ask because there is something avant-garde about the novel’s form. When Xavier enters her life, things seem like they get turned upside down, but then later we wonder if they’ve actually been turned right side up.
I think that detail is there because it was important to me to imply that Tomas had a kind of tie to an émigré culture, that he comes from outside in some way—much as the narrator, who is Asian American, is American, but comes from outside as well in some way. So that detail was doing a bit of embroidery on the relationship.
I would say that the book has been designed to be read in several ways. So, as you said, it could be upside down or it could be right side up, and that was the great pleasure and, in a way, trick of writing the book. I’ve come to see it almost as a bit of a Rorschach blot: which side of the book readers think is true, or right side up, versus which is upside down says something about their own desires. What do you want to be true? What do you prefer to be a fantasy? That was one of my endeavors in writing the book—so it’s not really an either-or but both. I’m so conscious of the fact that when I read, my own desires as a reader are radically shaping the book. [Laughs.]
What’s funny?
Czech Cubism—just that that’s what I picked to convey that. [Continues laughing.] Sorry.
No worries! Try to think of German Expressionism. So, this is your fourth novel, but your first one set in the United States. What made you decide to come home?
I’ve always been really interested in writing outsiders, and the point of view of somebody who’s newly arrived in a place. My characters are often like anthropologists, studying the culture, the mores, the rituals of a place. That was useful for me as a writer because I was trying to figure out as well what the terrain of the novel was. After four novels, I thought, Maybe I have the skills to write about a place I know very, very well without that shield of discovery. But this character is so dislocated in her life that the sense of dislocation that I have often relied on location to achieve was much more internal here.
Yes, even though we’re in New York City, there’s something off-kilter right from the start. The novel begins in a restaurant in the financial district that’s laughably nondescript. It’s identical to all the ones around it. Xavier and the narrator are at this weird table, in between the kitchen and the bathroom. Even though this is your homecoming, the atmosphere is uncomfortable and uncanny.
I’m obsessed as a writer by these moments where the fabric of your day-to-day reality starts to tear a little bit. I’ve primarily looked at that in personal relationships—that moment when you look at somebody you’ve spent a large portion of your life with and suddenly, they seem to you like a stranger. In this novel, I tried to do that a little bit with the city. All the locations are quite clearly delineated, but as you say there’s something a little bit murky about them. When she goes into her apartment, it sometimes feels a little bit like a stage set. There are these moments when she’s looking at her life and she no longer entirely recognizes it as her own. New York City felt like a great city to do that. I’m thinking about even a film like “Rosemary’s Baby.” That sense of alienation, that sense of a slight remove, something bubbling under the surface—that’s as New York a story as glamour or whatever else.
The novel is called “Audition,” but there’s no audition in it. If anything, we mostly see rehearsals. Why that title, and did you consider others?
I think there are two meanings to the word that I really liked. One is that, you know, “audition” is also hearing. There’s a sound landscape around the characters—particularly in the second half, she’s hearing things at a heightened level, so at various moments she’ll be in a café and the sound of a spoon on a cup will seem unusually loud, or she’ll be at home and she can hear the other character speaking and they sound like termites inside wood. So there’s a sense that there’s a kind of heightened sensory experience in the novel, but most fundamentally it’s that the characters are in some way trying on different parts. I thought about “Performance” as a title, but I think, to some extent, “Audition” felt like it was more contingent. The characters are trying on different arrangements, auditioning for different relationships with each other.
You had two prior careers before becoming a writer. You trained to be a ballet dancer, then you did a Ph.D. in American literature in the U.K. That’s fascinating to me, because one of the things I love about your novels is that they take us behind the scenes of these different career types. We see inside the I.C.C. in “Intimacies,” and you get quite granular in “A Separation” about the labor of literary translation. You seem to be really taken with jobs and how your characters talk about their jobs.
I love workplace novels. I consider “Intimacies” a workplace novel. I think one of the things that novels excel at is depicting the relationship between the individual and a larger social structure. That is what makes novels special. I think a workplace is a place where you very closely see the relationship between the individual and the institution. It can tell you about some kind of structural reality about the society that the characters are living in through granular detail, like the quality of the coffee in the break room or how the office space is organized. There’s so many ways in which hierarchies of power are built into a workspace, and so as a novelist you then don’t have to say, “hierarchies of power”—you can just have a character who’s at their desk working and is aware that their boss can see their screen.
What are some of your favorite workplace novels?
Recently, I really liked Halle Butler’s “The New Me.” Raven Leilani’s “Luster” has some wonderful workplace scenes. Also, Hilary Leichter’s “Temporary.”
Which is about a temp with over twenty jobs.
Yes, that novel—it stretches like gum!
You don’t always write explicitly political novels, but your characters’ lives are certainly shaped by the political forces around them. “A Separation” is about a divorce, but the effects of the Greek financial crisis can absolutely be felt in the background. In “Intimacies,” the characters work at the I.C.C. but also are contemplating their strained personal relationships amid the lead-up to Brexit. What does it mean to set a novel in the U.S. right now, politically speaking? I’m thinking of the fact that your main character is an actress who is starting to have some difficulty distinguishing what’s real from what’s not.
“Audition” was written, broadly speaking, during the Biden Administration and the pandemic. This is clearly not a pandemic novel, and yet it is a novel in which people are sequestered in rooms together with their family and they slowly go a bit crazy. It was finished well before the election, but I think this idea of the power of fantasy is something that is politically relevant. Novels and writing in general feel incredibly important, because it is already clear, in the new Administration, that language is going to be a terrain where a substantial part of this battle is going to be fought: what language people are allowed to use, how language is manipulated or denuded of meaning. I think what writers do or can try to do is to use language with precision and care. When words stop meaning what they’re meant to mean, then we’re in trouble.
I think also this novel, like your previous ones, takes on masculinity, and male appetites for domination.
I mean, it’s not a coincidence that the central character is not a writer and the two men in her life are both writers. The younger man announces he has written a part for her to play.
There are so many Katie Kitamura classics in this novel, from the unnamed narrator to one of my favorites: the missing male. There’s the estranged husband who goes missing in “A Separation,” the boyfriend in “Intimacies” who absconds to Lisbon, supposedly to ask his wife for a divorce. In “Audition,” there’s one point where the main character comes home to her apartment and Tomas isn’t there. I thought—ah, she’s done it again! What is it about the male in absentia that fascinates you?
My husband asked me the same thing: why do all your male characters either end up dead or disappeared? In both “A Separation” and “Intimacies,” what you would call the love interest is absent for almost the entirety of the book. It was also an interesting formal constraint in a way. Would it be possible to write romantic narratives without the male characters being present? And I think, you know, I write characters who are very much in their heads and who live through their projection in some way. In this novel, the two male characters don’t disappear, but the narrator’s projections onto them—if anything—grow more fevered in their presence. Learning to layer projection and keep it inside a scene, rather than have it purely internal, was a new challenge.
I also love writing women. So that’s part of the reason why I often hustle male characters to other countries. In this novel, men are no longer absent. The central tension is that Xavier’s come back, one way or another, into her life and now she has to deal with his presence. She can’t find a place to be by herself. Everyone’s home and wants breakfast.
You yourself, in your writing career, left men behind. Your first two novels, “The Longshot” and “Gone to the Forest,” centered on male characters, and immediately people were comparing you to Hemingway and Coetzee. Then came two novels in a row, now a third, about women, narrated by female protagonists and in the first person. The comparison changed to Cusk. Can you say more about why you shifted subjects? Or did you shift? Maybe you’re still looking at masculinity, albeit from an angle, at a remove?
I think the choice to write first-person female narrators was incredibly personal in a lot of ways. I think it had a lot to do with my own sense of comfort as a writer. You know, I didn’t do an M.F.A. My first novel was the first piece of fiction I ever wrote. I didn’t want to [write about women] until I was sure I was really good enough. You know, writing male characters is not very difficult because there is a vast canon of male characters written by men, for men, for any writer starting out to draw from. Finding the voice of a male character is in so many ways what a Ph.D. in American literature trains you to do. What felt, to me, more challenging was to write female characters, and so I took a little bit of time to get there. Writing female characters is something that holds so much depth and interest for me. It feels almost inexhaustible. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
