Identity crisis

An actor's story becomes an exercise in the uncanny and a radical deconstruction of relationships and the social roles we play

- Sam Byers

There is an eeriness to great acting. Studied movements take on life; a living other emerges. Bad acting achieves no such uncanniness. The failing actor never dissolves into their role. We watch them watching themselves act.

Although we rarely see her on stage, the actor narrating Audition, Katie Kitamura's unnerving, desperately tense fifth novel, never stops watching herself perform. Even passing, offhand phrases seem to fray under the strain of an unsustainable self-awareness.

"You might think that people wondered how we did it," she says, describing the comfortable Manhattan lifestyle she shares with her husband. The perspectives are tortuous, unmanageable. Who is this "you" that might imagine their way into the opinions of unseen others? As the novel progresses, these gazes are experienced as social roles both longed for and resisted. "How many times had Ibeen told how much it meant to some person or another, seeing someone who looked like me on stage or on screen,"she says, one of many moments in the novel in which ethnicity is acknowledged, but never explicitly named.

The novel's opening pages establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hypervigilant. Waiting at the table is a young man, Xavier, self-assured and faintly discomfiting.

The meeting is edgy and awkward, rendered in a tapestry of small gestures.