A middle-aged woman gets a note from an attractive young man about half her age, who asks her to have coffee with him, where he reveals to her that he believes she might be his mother. In the first telling, she says that’s impossible, but ends up helping him try to start his career in theater. In the second telling, he isn’t just her son, but he grew up with her, and is merely coming back home to live while he gets his career going.
In Audition, Katie Kitamura explores her main character-narrator twice over, and the result is that the character changes, but our perception of her changes even more, not least because of what western societies tell us about motherhood and women in general. The first half, where the young man isn’t her son, shows her as colder, less empathetic, more calculating, while the second has her warmer, but also more anxious and submissive. One of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, it’s a terse exploration of how we* see women based on their roles and the actions of the men around them.
* Especially me, a man raised in an even more patriarchal era than our own, and raised around a lot of traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
Kitamura’s prose is sparse, almost clinical, especially in the first half of the book, where Xavier (the young man) isn’t her son because she has never carried a pregnancy to term. In that story, she’s been unfaithful to her husband Tomas many times, so when he spots her with Xavier in a restaurant, he might suspect this is her latest lover. The combination of her treatment of Tomas and her rational, almost emotionless reaction to Xavier’s appearance and the possibility of an alternate history comes across as even more surprising because she’s a woman – even though that clouded lens is ours.
Right around the midpoint, Kitamura begins part two, which might as well be a separate novella, as it opens with Xavier returning home to live temporarily because of his demanding new job as an assistant to the director of a play in which his mother is acting. That he is her son is assumed – there’s no transition to this new scenario – and only as the story unfolds do we see how her character is changed, along with that of Tomas, who is the philanderer in this half. Now the narrator is anxious, eager to please both her son and her husband, and becomes submissive to the point of reducing her importance and presence in her own apartment.
It seems like Kitamura is exploring how becoming a mother changes both a woman’s actual character – the narrator in part two isn’t a tradwife, but I couldn’t help but think of that misogynistic trend – and how everyone around her treats and sees her. Kitamura’s thumb is on the scale here, of course, but she’s playing fair with the parent’s instinct to give up things for their children, even if it’s to the point of giving in when they shouldn’t. (I have struggled with this myself, so I was especially primed to see the second story this way.) The stereotype that mothers are caring and warm while women who aren’t mothers, regardless of the reason, must be cold and lacking in empathy is reasonably pervasive in our society, and Kitamura pushes both of those generalizations to reasonably extreme points to expose them.
I would have picked Audition over Angel Down for the Pulitzer, although I think Audition’s prose, while direct and quick to read, lacks some of the beauty or energy found I would hope to see in a winner of any such literary prize. Her language is more clinical in the first half, while she doesn’t entirely shed that in the second half; if you love the prose of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver, you might connect with Audition more than I did. I engaged more with the novel’s philosophical aims and the thought experiment within than I did the language or even the dual main character, although that ultimately was enough to get this over the line for me.
Next up: I’m about halfway through Eric Ambler’s Passage of Arms.