Betwixt and Between — Katie Kitamura’s Audition Embraces the Indeterminate
Published in April 2025 and just shy of two hundred pages, Audition by Katie Kitamura has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Following the perspective of a New York-based actress, the story is set in motion by Xavier, a young man claiming to be the son of our unnamed narrator. As a whole, the novel is less concerned with the truth of the aforementioned statement than it is with its implications: woman and man, strangers, lovers or family.
It is the liminality of these relationships that Audition explores most deeply. Kitamura touches on the inherently negotiated nature of identity between ourselves and others and how through self-bargaining, we satiate the human desire for certain resolution. Furthermore, this self-bargaining holds a mirror to the construction of the self: the behaviors and beliefs we perform in an effort to free ourselves from the threat of the unknown.
However, most of my analysis of the novel is directly related to its ambiguity.
Kitamura delivers Audition in a two-act structure, similar to that of a straight play; a fitting literary device considering our narrator’s profession and the novel’s focus on performance and identity. Kitamura opts to omit quotation marks—a fantastically poetic choice as absolute reality dissipates alongside the lost punctuation. This departure from conventional punctuation results in an immersive read that obscures the line between the reader’s interpretation and the narrative itself. Kitamura dedicates a fair amount of effort to atmosphere, ensuring the reader is enveloped wholly, making for a read that is both suffocating and therapeutic. To put it simply, Audition is stunning; gorgeously written, unmistakably clever, and certainly worthy of its mounting accolades.
Still, some critics have been unable to see beyond its enigmatic quality. Rather than identify who Xavier is, Kitamura invites the reader to revel in the freedom of what's left unsaid. Recently, Ocean Vuong coined the concept of ‘literary edging’, a narrative form which refers to the deliberate withholding of anticipated resolution, and a reader’s prolonged exposure to plot tension.
Rejecting the expectation that literature must resolve itself, Audition refuses to fulfill what Vuong calls the "commercial promise to ameliorate tension." In doing so, the novel is put at odds with those who have found themselves deprived of the catharsis they are accustomed to, and believe themselves to be entitled to.
The beauty of Kitamura’s Audition, however, is that it is less an act of withholding than an invitation for readers to reclaim analytical authority. She resists becoming the authority responsible for resolving the novel's ambiguities – and as a consequence, liberates audiences from their practices of deference when faced with complexity.
Kitamura seems to be aware of and playing on the discomfort around uncertainty. From that space of discomfort, and worsened by our collective shortening attention span and endurance for critical thought, readers are quick to position others, especially creatives, as the voices of authority in their given medium—completely missing the point of the arts. Rather than working through cognitive discomfort, readers will seek to create a figurehead, one who is surely more capable of explanation, to relieve us from concepts that have yet to be understood, thus ensuring the digestibility of our troubles.
Convoluted by nature, the novel recognizes two parallel realities as legitimate, and makes no effort to determine one as the unchallenged truth. Kitamura, herself, is in no rush to decipher the truth for her readers either. Instead, in the liminal space between what is and isn’t, the truth can very well lie in the middle ground, and making sense of that overlap, is a responsibility bestowed on the reader.
It would be entirely too easy to write this choice off, as many have, as juvenile or lazy. Rather than making a mistake similar to the narrator’s, and viewing this creative decision, or lack thereof, as an indication of author fault or limitation, I believe the novel should be recognized for the dialectic practice that it is. Perhaps that's the novel's best quality.
Kitamura does not ask anything of her readers that she herself is not willing to model. The collection of narrative decisions serves the larger purpose of nurturing duality. The novel is a vehicle for introspection, and with Kitamura’s work, readers are provided the opportunity to examine their own personal discomfort and given space to safely explore dichotomous thinking. Audition may not satisfy our human desire for resolution, but as society inches towards the simplification of the human experience, it certainly maintains value as a rallying cry against that simplification.