ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The new novel "Audition" opens with a scene in a Manhattan restaurant. The narrator is meeting a young man for lunch, and everybody has a different understanding of their relationship - the woman, the man, the waiter. They might be parent and child. He could be her admirer. She might be paying him for a date. This sort of ambiguity is at the heart of Katie Kitamura's novel. She told me she got the idea for the book from a headline she saw years ago.
KATIE KITAMURA: The headline said, a stranger told me he was my son. And I actually never read the article because I almost immediately knew that I wanted to write a novel on this premise. I was completely captivated by the idea that in a single encounter, in a single moment, everything you understand about yourself and your place in the world could be overturned.
But I was also fascinated by the kind of opposition between stranger and son. Those are two words that we think of as diametrically opposed, kind of mutually exclusive, and I was interested in that tension. And for a long time, I couldn't really figure it out. I kept thinking, what is it about this that interests me? And finally, I was speaking to a friend of mine who has a older child, a kind of college-age son, and she said, but that's just a description of parenthood. That's what it's like every single...
SHAPIRO: Wow.
KITAMURA: ...Time my son comes home. And so that was when I kind of cracked the idea open. You know, I had this sense I wanted to write about how, at the heart of some very, very universal experiences of parenthood, of marriage, of love, of making art, are these kind of inherent contradictions that can't really be resolved.
SHAPIRO: Others have explored the idea that you don't really know the people closest to you, but this book explores it in a really - the word that I keep seeing that I think is very accurate is a very destabilizing way. It's hard to find your footing in this book.
KITAMURA: (Laughter) Yeah. I mean, I wanted to find a kind of mode of storytelling, a form for the novel that would convey that destabilization you're talking about, when you feel that somebody you should know very, very well - whether it's your partner or your mother or your child - suddenly does appear to you as a stranger. And I thought there has to be a form of storytelling that will convey some of that. So the book is, I think, quite disorienting. It's a little bit like a hall of mirrors in a way.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. Let's talk about the form...
KITAMURA: OK.
SHAPIRO: ...Because it's very startling.
KITAMURA: Yeah (laughter).
SHAPIRO: Halfway through the narrative, there is a hard break. And when the story picks up again, the relationships have changed in a way that is unnerving, disorienting - choose your word. Did you always know this would be a narrative split in two?
KITAMURA: I mean, I'm fascinated by stories that are cut in half, you know?
SHAPIRO: Why?
KITAMURA: I mean, I don't know. I think about something like "Vertigo." The Hitchcock movie is kind of sliced right in half. There are other examples. There's a wonderful Japanese film by the director Kore-eda Hirokazu called "Shoplifters," which - in the middle of the movie, there's a kind of revelation, and suddenly you understand everything about the characters differently. And I think I thought with this book, I wonder if I can enact that kind of change through form. And so what I did instead is I just took a leap of faith and I made a big running jump and hopefully landed on the other side (laughter).
SHAPIRO: There's also another layer to this...
KITAMURA: Yeah
SHAPIRO: ...Story split in two because your narrator is an actress who is rehearsing a play that is also divided into two disjointed parts, two parts that the narrator struggles to reconcile. Tell me about the kind of nesting dolls aspect of this.
KITAMURA: Yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in the idea that in all of us are irreconcilable, incommensurate parts of ourselves that can't be turned into a single unified identity. That's very much the struggle that the character is facing in the play that she's rehearsing. At some point, she says, there's not a kind of unifying identity for this character. The arc of this character isn't there. And that's the puzzle of the play, but in a lot of ways, it's also the puzzle of the book, which is, it's two parts, but they're not meant to fit together. They're meant to just sit alongside each other.
SHAPIRO: As I read it, as I finished reading it, I wondered whether I was supposed to be able to solve this puzzle. And from what you're saying, it sounds like, no, a solution is not the point.
KITAMURA: No. I mean, that's a kind of way of storytelling I love as a reader, but it's not something I'm interested in, I think, as a writer, you know?
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) You don't want the Agatha Christie mystery that...
KITAMURA: Well...
SHAPIRO: ...At the end, you find out who done it.
KITAMURA: Well, I did grow up on mysteries. You know, I - actually, it's funny you mention Agatha Christie because I read those books compulsively as a child. I read them over and over and over again. And the thing is, it didn't matter if I knew the solution or not. I love the form of it. And I think it's in my DNA as a writer in some way, the form of the mystery. But again, it's not a puzzle to be solved.
I think I didn't like the idea of having an answer or knowing something that the reader didn't know. I didn't want it to be like the reader had to figure out something that I was withholding from them. It's very much a kind of book that's open to interpretation. It's been designed so that it can be read in two or three or maybe even four different ways. And I sometimes describe it a little bit as a kind of rabbit-duck book, you know? You know those drawings...
SHAPIRO: Oh, like, the image that you can see as a rabbit or a duck.
KITAMURA: Yes.
SHAPIRO: And so are readers, now that it's out in the world, coming up to you and saying, specifically, I believed your book was about this, I read your book in that way, and they're irreconcilable?
KITAMURA: Yes.
SHAPIRO: I think what you're describing is universal. This idea - it's not my idea, I forget where it came from - that the writer and the reader climb opposite sides of the mountain and meet at the top. But it feels much more true of this book than most that I've read (laughter).
KITAMURA: That's so lovely 'cause that's really what I was hoping to do with this book. I really thought of it as an invitation to the reader. I felt - when I was writing the book, I thought, I'm trying to just make a structure that is big enough to hold both me and the reader so that I can kind of invite the reader inside and say, make this book alongside me.
SHAPIRO: You said that different readers have approached you with different feelings or reactions or interpretations, and I would love to tell you mine...
KITAMURA: Oh, I would love to hear it.
SHAPIRO: ...Which was, to me, the book gave me the experience of, at any minute it could become a horror novel, but it never does. And it feels like a bizarre question to ask you, but I wonder if you can explain why I felt that way 'cause I don't know why.
KITAMURA: I mean, I was thinking about horror a lot when I was writing this book, and the book that I had in mind was "Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levin, which is a novel about, I think, postpartum depression on one level. It's a novel about a family. It's a novel about real estate in New York. And in a lot of ways, "Audition" is all of those things. It feels a little bit like a haunted house story, I think. It's set more or less in one place, and all the characters are trapped in that space, and things start to unfurl a little bit.
I also think the real moment of horror in any of these films or books is when you look at something you think you know and it looks unrecognizable. So there's a wonderful moment in Shirley Jackson's "A Haunting Of Hill House" (ph) when the character looks out the window, and she can see a part of the house she shouldn't be able to see, and it's something about the space itself has changed. The location that she knew very well is suddenly unrecognizable. And that, I hope, happens again and again in this book, whether it's the physical space of the apartment, the man the central character is married to, the younger man who enters her life.
SHAPIRO: Thank you for explaining why I felt that way. It's very...
KITAMURA: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: ...Very helpful. I appreciate it. Katie Kitamura, it's been so great talking with you. Thank you.
KITAMURA: Thank you.
SHAPIRO: Her new novel is called "Audition."
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