An actress is standing outside a Manhattan restaurant, looking through the window at the young man she has agreed to meet. Something about the sight makes her want to leave. Then a stranger comes out and holds the door for her.
She goes in.
It is an exceptionally small way for a novel to set itself in motion. Nobody has ordered her to stay. The stranger has done something considerate. Yet an intention formed a moment earlier has become harder to act on, simply because another person has entered the scene.
Katie Kitamura's Audition begins with this adjustment. Before we know much about the woman or her lunch companion, we know something about the space between deciding and doing. It can be occupied by a courtesy, a look, an invitation whose refusal would require more explanation than we feel able to give.
The young man is Xavier. He believes she may be his mother; she understands that possibility to be impossible. Their meeting begins without a shared account of what they are to each other. It is a striking premise, but the opening published by the Booker Prizes offers a quieter reason to keep reading: the two people have to get through lunch while inhabiting different versions of it.
The distance from the door to the table
The restaurant does not provide a neutral space in which an important conversation can happen. People pass through it, make judgments, interrupt, and move on. The narrator's private difficulty has to coexist with everyone else's ordinary afternoon.
When she points Xavier out to the host, she notices his eyes moving over her face, clothing, and jewelry. She takes his reaction to concern her age. He is trying, she thinks, to understand why this woman is meeting that young man.
But the host does not explain himself. What reaches us is her interpretation of a glance. She may be perceptive; she may also be filling in an uncertainty with a judgment she already fears. Kitamura makes that distinction available without stopping the scene to warn us that the narrator might be unreliable.
The result is more interesting than a contest between a trustworthy account and a false one. This is how much ordinary perception works. We see someone look at us and immediately begin to supply the thought behind the look. Our account can feel complete even though the other person has contributed no words.
As she follows the host, leaving becomes awkward in a new way. She could still turn around. Nothing physical prevents it. But now she would be departing from an encounter visibly in progress, abandoning the sequence she has begun to participate in.
The opening gives that sequence weight. Entering, following, approaching a table: these are not merely instructions for getting a character into position. Each action changes what the next action might look like to other people. By the time the conversation starts, she has already been making decisions in response to an audience.
That is one pleasure of trying the excerpt. It asks us to notice a familiar experience without pretending it is simple. Social pressure need not arrive as hostility. The person holding the door may remain entirely innocent of what the gesture has made difficult.
One lunch, two conversations
At the table, the difference between their intentions becomes audible. The actress asks about Xavier's courses while he begins to apologize for their previous meeting. They speak at almost the same time, reaching for different ways to begin.
A question about classes offers an ordinary subject. An apology asks for the earlier encounter to be reopened. Both can sound polite, but they do not make the same request of the listener.
The narrator wants some distance from a troubling proposition. Xavier seems eager to explain himself. His urgency may be sincere and still be unwelcome. Her efforts to establish a manageable conversation may be reasonable and still leave him feeling unheard.
There is no need to decide immediately which person deserves our allegiance. The scene becomes more compelling when we can remain interested in both the pressure she feels and his need for a response. An encounter can hurt or unsettle someone without either participant possessing a complete account of what they are doing.
The actress is not an unformed young person waiting for the plot to supply her first identity. She has a professional reputation, rehearsals to attend, and a life with her husband, Tomas, in the West Village. Xavier's suggestion reaches into arrangements she has already made, not into an empty space.
Even agreeing to lunch can acquire different meanings under these circumstances. For her it might be a chance to clarify a misunderstanding. For him it might look like the beginning of recognition. Neither interpretation has to be spoken aloud before it starts influencing the conversation.
This is the opening's sharpest question: when she agreed to meet him, what did she agree to? There is no shared answer from which to proceed. The ordinary business of listening has begun before the relationship that would explain it has been settled.
An actor has to do something with a line
Her profession makes this uncertainty especially productive. The actress is rehearsing a play called The Opposite Shore, and she is struggling to understand how to perform a scene. In Jennifer Wilson's interview with Kitamura for The New Yorker, interpretation is discussed as work that connects the novel's theatrical and everyday encounters.
An actor's interpretation cannot remain an idea. It has to enter a voice, a movement, a pause. The distance between two bodies may change the meaning of a line that looks perfectly clear on the page. Understanding is tested in what someone does.
The restaurant has similar materials: timing, posture, the degree of eagerness in another person's face. The narrator's attention to them can feel like professional skill carried beyond the theatre. Yet being good at noticing does not necessarily make her good at stopping an encounter from overwhelming her.
It would flatten this premise to say that everyone wears a mask and the task is to uncover the real person underneath. Performance is not only concealment. It is also a way of finding out what one can do in the company of other people.
Kitamura makes that distinction in her conversation with Lauren Puckett-Pope for ELLE. She questions the idea that stripping away our roles would reveal a stable, authentic self, and describes performance as a place in which we discover ourselves.
That gives the actress's work an interest beyond metaphor. A role can constrain her, but it can also demand an ability she has not previously needed. The important question may be how much room she has to understand and shape it, rather than whether she can live without roles at all.
Rehearsal allows an attempt to fail and be tried again. A relationship can acquire its name much faster. Someone calls us a parent, a partner, a teacher; expectations arrive with the word. Often we are already responding before we have decided whether the part fits.
How much uncertainty is a pleasure?
Audition is a short novel, and its opening generates tension without continually adding incidents. A delayed answer or an overextended courtesy can be enough. The passage rewards readers who enjoy watching the meaning of a gesture change while the gesture itself remains quite ordinary.
That is not the same pleasure as collecting clues for a final solution. In her NPR interview with Ari Shapiro, Kitamura explains that she is not withholding a correct answer that the reader must discover. Her interest lies in allowing more than one interpretation.
This is useful information for choosing the book, even while its later developments remain unmentioned here. If your favorite part of a mystery is the moment every detail becomes accountable to one explanation, this novel offers a different invitation.
There are possible frustrations too. Reserve can become distance. An ambiguity that creates tension for one reader may feel unproductive to another. The opening is a good test: does the walk through the restaurant hold your attention, or are you impatient for the supposedly important material to begin?
Ann Levin's Associated Press review praises the novel's unease while questioning its unusually polished slice of New York. That observation sets a useful boundary. These interiors and their inhabitants are not a social panorama of the city.
They can nevertheless sustain a close and unsettling encounter. We need no knowledge of the theatre world to recognize the difficulty of answering a question whose implications keep changing. Nor do we need a theory of identity to understand why someone might regret accepting a courtesy.
There is also our own first impression to consider. When a woman and a much younger man sit down together, we may have assigned them a relationship before either has spoken. Audition's opening gives us time to notice that we, too, have been looking through the restaurant window.