Control · Fall 2026Page 83 of 100.THE REVIEW
A dark theater with rows of empty seats faces a closed stage curtain lit by spotlights.
A curtained stage above rows of empty seats. Kitamura’s narrator is an actress, and the novel suggests she never quite stops performing once the house lights go down.The photograph is by Ann H on Pexels.

Review

Kitamura builds a hall of mirrors and forgets to light it.

Katie Kitamura’s Audition is a cool, clever novel about an actress who may or may not be a mother, and its cleverness is both its strength and its limit.

Written by CONTROL

This article runs 427 words and takes about two minutes to read.

7out of 10
Book
Audition
By
Katie Kitamura
From
Riverhead Books, 2025

Katie Kitamura writes novels in which nobody can be sure what anyone else means. In Intimacies, her previous book, the narrator was an interpreter. In Audition, published by Riverhead in April 2025 and shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize, she is an actress in New York, unnamed, in rehearsal for a new play, and the question of interpretation has moved from language to identity itself.

The novel opens at lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. The narrator is sitting with Xavier, a much younger man, and the scene is charged in a way that an onlooker would misread. Xavier believes she is his mother. She has no children, and she is married to Tomas, a husband with whom she maintains a careful, practiced distance. That is the first half. In the second, the novel quietly resets. Now Xavier is her son, he has moved in with her and Tomas, the play has a different name, and the household has begun to bend around him in ways that feel less like love than like submission.

Two wooden chairs stand apart on an empty stage beneath a row of spotlights.
Two chairs face each other on a bare, lit stage. Audition runs its story twice, and in both versions the scene is a woman across from a young man she cannot read.The photograph is by Av E on Pexels.
A microphone on a stand faces the balconies of an empty, softly lit theater.
A microphone waits before an empty auditorium. In Audition, motherhood, marriage and acting all become roles, performed for an audience that may consist of a single person.The photograph is by A. S. on Pexels.

Two versions, one performer

The structure is the point, and it is an elegant one. Kitamura asks the reader to hold both versions at once and to notice how little the narrator changes between them. Whether Xavier is a stranger or a son, she responds with the same watchfulness and the same sense of playing a role for an audience of one. Motherhood, marriage and acting all become forms of performance, and the book is at its best in the small, precise scenes where she catches herself performing and cannot stop.

Kitamura’s sentences are clean and cold, and at 208 pages the novel never outstays its welcome. The trouble is that the design is more interesting than the people inside it. Xavier stays a device rather than a person, and Tomas registers mostly as a mood. The narrator’s detachment, which is meant to disturb, sometimes just flattens. A reader can finish the book admiring its architecture and still feel shut out of the house, which may be the intention but is not always a pleasure.

There is a real idea here about how much of a family is agreed on rather than given, and about how easily a person with no firm center can be cast in any part. Kitamura presents that idea with discipline. She simply declines to warm it.

The verdict: It is worth reading for its nerve and its structure, and worth discussing afterward. Readers who want characters as well as puzzles may find it more impressive than moving.