Audition by Katie Kitamura

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I went through a period where I loved the work of the 20th-century French author Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote The Voyeur, Jealousy, and The Erasers, along with the screenplay for the 1961 Alain Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet posited that you can never truly know anyone, including yourself, and his writing consisted of detached observations and complex, twisted circumstances, often with different versions presented so that the reader is never quite sure what happened or, often, who the characters really are. His writing prompts you to question who you yourself are and whether you really can know anyone else.

Katie Kitamura plays in similar territory in Audition, but she tackles this problem by employing the trope of alternate realities. The book is divided into two sections, with one involving a young man who believes the narrator may be his mother and another in which he is her son. She is an actress, and in the first part she struggles with a role, unable to connect, while in the second she masters it and the play becomes a hit. Her marriage also functions differently in each.

In telling this story, Kitamura makes the curious choice of using a close first-person narrator. The narrator makes copious minute observations that, combined with the wooden, unnatural dialogue, make you wonder what, if any of it, really occurred.

Kitamura’s writing is careful, but the unnatural detail and clarity in which she tells her story constantly highlight the artifice in it. The narrator also has a void at her center. You don’t understand her or her motivations. The characters around her are also thin caricatures, cardboard cutouts moved around the board in different ways. The novel would have worked better for me if the characters were more fully developed, but as written it comes across as fairly shallow and meaningless. There are several allusions to identity politics, but nothing readers won’t already know, just another dimension to how people view others without really understanding them.

The theme of empty people who can’t connect is common in film, literature, and other arts. So is the idea of being an actor on the stage of life (see William Shakespeare). While there’s something to be said for a new generation discovering the artistic questions that plagued earlier generations, this is a fairly simplistic treatment. It’s not particularly thought-provoking and not very enjoyable, either. The novel amounts to a bunch of privileged people living comfortable lives in the big city, caring about little but themselves and wondering why they feel so empty.

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’ve been sampling a series of post-apocalyptic contemporary novels in search of “comps”–comparable titles–for my own. I’ve been putting most down, as they’re focused more on the action than the characters, but I’m pausing to write reviews about those that stand out. Eiren Caffall‘s All the Water in the World is one of the best entries I’ve come across in the copious environmental catastrophe category.

Caffall is a nature writer and science journalist who’s covered changing ecosystems. Her godfather’s experience during Hurricane Sandy gave her the idea of writing a novel about what would happen after a massive climate and civilizational collapse. The book follows a group of survivors in a now mostly deserted New York City who are living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural history, which they call Amen, and doing what they can to preserve the treasures there. The narrator is a thirteen year old girl who is neurodivergent, although whether she has an autism spectrum disorder, trauma, or something else isn’t explained. Still, Nonie is an interesting character with a feel for predicting storms, and her slightly askew point of view a fascinating perspective.

Much of the novel alternates between the present and flashbacks, which sometimes bog the story down. The book could have benefited from a looser structure, I think. But the novel stands out from others of its kind in its attention to character and its general thoughtfulness. Whereas other novels in this group tend to allow the action to take over, this one never loses sight of its characters and its reason for being. Caffall’s writing here evokes Emily St. John Mandel‘s outstanding pandemic novel Station Eleven. In fact, I’d be surprised if Caffall didn’t use that book as a model, as the climactic scene at the end echoes the one in Mandel’s book.

Caffall, a museum lover, asks what we save in times of collapse. She also takes seriously the question of what comes afterward. How can we build a better way? This is a thoughtful book wrapped in a speculative adventure story. It’s well worth reading and thinking about.