Get the latest gossip
Katie Kitamura Gets Too Abstract
Audition’s lack of novelistic detail is both a strength and a weakness.
A good portion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park revolves around a raunchy amateur version of Lovers’ Vows that disturbs hopelessly uptight Fanny Price; more recently, there’s been the West Bank production of Hamlet in Isabella Hammad’s 2023 novel, Enter Ghost, and the teenagers’ dangerous improvisations in Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. Minor gestures, like Xavier’s downcast exhalation, which the actress believes he lifted from her own performances in order to manipulate her, provoke massive internal upset: “Anger surged through me … The situation was more dangerous than I had previously understood.” It’s a surprisingly tense moment that doesn’t explain the stakes, full of feelings that aren’t attached to anything definitive, and it sets up the central question of the book: Can a novel conjure up emotion without stable characters? In the second half of the book, which could be a fantasy, an alternate universe, or just a slight shift in one direction, Xavier and the actress are mother and son, though at times he seems like a stranger to her, and there might have been some dramatic rupture in their past that she can’t quite recall.
Or read this on VULTURE