Before I became a journalist, I got a Ph.D. in Russian literature. I don’t miss academia, but I do miss my Moscow “field work”: gypsy cabs, Georgian wine, politically subversive theatre, cosmonaut sleeping pills, flirting with “the enemy,” etc. The thing I loved most about living in a foreign country was how much quieter my mind became. I had to mute my internal English monologue so that Russian could find a way in. It made shutting up feel glamorous, like I was some mysterious, silent woman in a spy movie.
The only way I can get back to that headspace now—especially now—is by reading the work of the novelist Katie Kitamura. I was first pulled into her precise but sticky web of language and moral ambiguity by “A Separation” (2017) and “Intimacies” (2021), a pair of novels narrated by cool, reserved women, elegantly adrift in foreign countries. In “A Separation,” a literary translator based in London travels to Greece to look for her estranged husband, who has gone missing while researching a book on professional mourners: women who train to vocalize the pain of relatives stunned into silence by grief. “Intimacies” is the story of a woman tasked with doing exactly that at the highest level—as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Her pauses, inflections, and hesitations when interpreting for victims of genocide are all counted among the evidence.
Kitamura is from California, and her new novel, “Audition,” is her first set on U.S. soil, but it’s still about a woman speaking words that aren’t quite her own. The main character is a married, middle-aged actress in New York City—Kitamura’s third unnamed narrator in a row—who’s preparing to star in a play called “The Opposite Shore.” She’s struggling to interpret a scene when a very attractive, much younger man named Xavier, himself an aspiring playwright, walks into the theatre and breaks open the plot of her life. “Audition” is almost two stories in one; the characters get rearranged for Act II in a way that upends our sense of the novel’s beginning, middle, and end. The effect is that this drama of male interference never quite concludes—a bit of realism Kitamura renders through the surreal.
I talked to Kitamura about absent love interests, the pleasures of the workplace novel, and why she’s drawn to female protagonists who like to turn down the volume on their own voices. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
“Audition” begins with the protagonist meeting Xavier for lunch, and it’s this long, extended scene where the two say very little to each other. In fact, most of the action takes place in glances, including glances shot their way by another diner and the waiter. There’s this feeling that everyone in the restaurant is trying to parse the texture of this relationship. Are they lovers? Are they mother and son? We as readers are likewise trying to gauge it, like, What does this restaurant choice mean? Is this a date? We’re really primed by this first scene to interpret the rest of the novel as being about interpretation on some level.
The first scene is quite important to the novel because the pair at the heart of the novel, the narrator and this younger man, become an object that is looked at by many different people, all of them interpreting the nature of their relationship differently. I’m very preoccupied by interpretation. It’s been a theme in the last three novels. I had a central character who is a translator, one who is an interpreter, and then this character who is an actor interpreting parts, interpreting this new play and struggling. Interpretation is at the heart of this novel in a funny way—even more than in my last novel, where the character is literally a simultaneous interpreter.
It’s interesting that you say that this novel is more about interpretation than your previous one, because there’s almost more about acting in “Intimacies” than there is in “Audition,” where the main character is an actress. The protagonist of “Intimacies” talks about how much of her job involves inflection and mimicry. She describes simultaneous interpretation as a performance, and the courtroom as a stage where everyone—the attorneys, the witnesses—has a role to play.
I’m drawn to characters, in particular female characters, who speak the words of other people. I’m interested in passivity. And that goes a little bit against the grain of what we’re told to look for in fiction. I teach creative writing, and in workshop, if there is a character who the group feels doesn’t have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character, as if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms. Of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. We operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency, but in reality, our choices are quite constricted.
So I’m interested in depicting characters who maybe understand that passivity a little bit more than other people might, and who are trying to grapple with what that means.
In “Intimacies,” I would say that the narrator, in the course of the novel, comes to wonder at what point passivity becomes a kind of complicity. Is she implicated, as a simultaneous interpreter at a war-crimes tribunal, in the institutional activity of the room where she works? I think in this novel, in “Audition,” you have somebody who’s very clearly getting a sense that the parts she’s being given to play are insufficient. I refer to “parts” both in theatre and in life; she’s always playing a part that somebody else has handed to her.
Speaking of role-play, I was really struck by the breakfast routine her husband has imposed on her. So her husband, Tomas, learned at an earlier point in their marriage that she had begun to stray, and he makes her atone by setting the breakfast table every morning with coffee and pastries from a nearby café—and the number of pastries starts to multiply. As the novel goes on, it becomes almost surreal and a little grotesque, this abundance of danishes every morning.
I hate breakfast. I never eat breakfast. I have a very contested relationship with breakfast. I kind of don’t understand the point of it. I just want to be able to get up and get on with my day with just liquid caffeine in my system.
The novel in general has quite a reduced palette—like, it’s not a novel in which the physical reality of the world is elaborated upon at length. There’s a handful of objects, and I always knew that I had to make the objects do a lot of work, that they would be objects that would appear in the first half of the novel and then again in the second half of the novel with a different set of connotations and a different set of meanings. And so I wanted the pastries to be more than pastries in some way. I wanted them to feel slightly sinister, you know, that they keep reappearing and there’s always too many of them. The husband never confronts the narrator about her extramarital affairs, but in a supremely passive-aggressive way he creates this ritual that she submits to that is deliberately mundane and bourgeois. It’s unbelievably boring, but that’s the point: she has committed herself to the marriage again through this act.
