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Before becoming a journalist, I completed a PhD in Russian literature. I miss academic life, but I do miss my Moscow “fieldwork”: gypsy taxis, Georgian wine, politically provocative theatre, sleeping pills for astronauts, flirting with the “enemy,” and so on. What I loved most was how quiet my mind became when living in another country. I had to silence my internal English monologue to let the Russian language break through to the surface. It made the process of withdrawing into myself seem glamorous, as if I were a mysterious, silent woman in a spy film.
For now, the only way to get back to that state — especially in the current moment — is to read the work of writer Katie Kitamura. I first became enchanted by her precise yet tangled web of language and moral ambiguity in Separation (2017) and Intimacy (2021), novels about quiet, reserved women navigating foreign lands with grace. In Separation, a literary translator in London travels to Greece to find her estranged husband, who goes missing while researching professional mourners — women who learn to express the grief of others overwhelmed by pain. Intimacy follows a woman who is tasked with carrying out that task at the highest level, as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Her pauses, intonations, and hesitations as she translates for genocide victims are taken into account as evidence.
Kitamura is originally from California, and her new novel, Audition, is her first to be set in the United States, but it’s still about a woman speaking in words that aren’t entirely her own. The protagonist is a middle-aged, married actress from New York City—Kitamura’s third unnamed narrator in a row—who is preparing to star in a play called Opposite Shore. She’s struggling to interpret a scene when a very attractive, much younger man named Xavier, an aspiring playwright, walks into the theater and reveals the plot of her life. Audition is almost two stories in one; the characters are rebuilt for the second act in a way that changes our perception of the novel’s beginning, middle, and end. The effect is that this drama of male meddling never really ends—a bit of realism that Kitamura conveys through elements of surrealism.
I spoke with Kitamura about nonexistent love interests, the pleasures of a workplace romance, and why she's drawn to female protagonists who prefer to keep their voices down. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
“The Audition” begins with the protagonist meeting Xavier for lunch, in a long, drawn-out scene in which they barely speak to each other. In fact, much of the action occurs through glances, including glances from another diner and a waiter. It feels like everyone in the restaurant is trying to figure out the structure of this relationship. Are they lovers? Are they mother and son? We, as readers, are also trying to figure it out, like, what does this restaurant choice mean? Is it a date? This first scene really sets us up to experience the rest of the novel as being about interpretation on some level.
The first scene is quite important to the novel because the couple at the center of the novel, the narrator and this young man, become the object of observation for many different people, each of whom interprets the nature of their relationship in their own way. I’m very passionate about interpretation. It’s been a theme in the last three novels. I had a central character who is an interpreter, one who is an actor interpreting roles, interpreting this new play and having trouble with it. Interpretation is central to this novel in a funny way – even more so than in my last novel, where a character is literally a simultaneous interpreter.
It’s interesting that you mention that this novel is more about interpretation than the previous one, because in Intimacy the acting almost dominates, whereas in Audition the protagonist is an actress. The protagonist of Intimacy talks about how much intonation and facial expressions play a role in her work. She describes simultaneous interpretation as a performance, and the courtroom as a stage where everyone – lawyers, witnesses – has a role.
I’m drawn to characters, especially women, who speak in other people’s words. I’m interested in passivity. And that’s a bit counter to what we’re told to look for in fiction. I teach creative writing, and in a workshop, if there’s a character that the group doesn’t think has agency, that’s often taken as a criticism of the character, as if a character without agency is implausible or somehow narratively unconvincing. Of course, the reality is that very few of us actually have full agency. We operate under the illusion or impression that we have a lot of freedom, but in reality, our choices are quite limited.
So I'm interested in portraying characters that maybe
Sourse: newyorker.com
