Katie Kitamura will take her new novel, Audition (Riverhead, April 8), on the road this spring, traveling down the East Coast, from Boston to Miami, then on to Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, before swinging back to Toronto and eventually stopping in Bath, England, and Paris. Her itinerary signals keen anticipation for Audition, the chilly, psychological story of a Manhattan stage actor and her pas de deux with a young man, Xavier, who claims that he may be her son. 

The book tour is a contrast to Kitamura’s pandemic-confined Zooms to promote her previous novel, Intimacies, a New York Times Top 10 book of 2021. Few writers wield a sharp contrast with more acuity than Kitamura, 46, who grew up in a bilingual California household and has, for a decade, taught creative writing at New York University. She is married to British novelist Hari Kunzru. They share a son, 12, and a daughter, 8. In a wide-ranging interview with Kirkus—alas, on Zoom—Kitamura says their home is awash with the manuscripts of student writers.

Audition comes eight years after her fiction breakout, A Separation, which unspooled in the mind of a nameless young woman whose estranged husband is missing. The narrator of Intimacies, also unnamed, is a translator who recently arrived at the Hague to staff a war crimes trial. Kitamura marinates all three slim novels in dread, fed by the unknowability of others, especially those with whom the narrators are intimate. 

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You divide Audition into two parts; the second is a radical reset of the first. How did you decide that was a necessity? 

I have a strong sense that general readers are very, very smart. Readers often understand things I’m trying to do and often perceive things that I hadn’t understood I was trying to do. I felt that particularly with Intimacies. If a book is going to work, a lot of it has to do with the attention and care of the reader. And that’s something I wanted to push further with this book, this sense that writing and reading are collaborative acts, that the novel takes shape in the space between the writer and the reader. I ask the reader to take a risk, take a leap, and if you’re going to do that, you also have to take a leap as a writer.  

Can you give an example of something a reader of Intimacies gave you that you hadn’t perceived yourself? 

There are so many. A reader had asked me if there was a lesson to the novel, and I said I didn’t think so. She said she thought the big lesson of the novel is that everybody gets away with it. [Chuckles.] It’s completely true. It’s part of the bleakness of the ethical landscape the narrator is trying to navigate. And as I was finishing the novel, the central war crimes case on which it is based was dismissed.

There’s a line that I really loved in the novel The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. The central character is a midcareer writer, and he says—I’m paraphrasing badly, apologies to Le Tellier—that if he could write one sentence that was more intelligent than he was, that would make him a writer. That may be the hope of all writers: that there be some alchemical event.  

Talk about your approach to Audition. 

I like to stage the surface and then kind of crack it. The aesthetic lodestar for this novel is really David Lynch. There are those wonderful moments at the beginning of Blue Velvet when you think you are seeing this beautiful lawn, and when you look closer, it’s teeming with undergrowth and darkness and disgust and fascination. That seems like one of the most interesting things in writing about American life: There is this very brittle narrative, and it doesn’t take a great deal to fracture that and see what’s underneath. 

Why nameless narrators? I’m thinking of your aesthetics alongside what Percival Everett does in James where the book’s last word, the culminating word, is “James.” 

I’m a huge admirer of Everett. He is a writer so acutely aware of how power functions, its force on individuals. There’s a lot of power in names—a lot of power to be gained and a lot of power to be lost. There is so much information in names. And once you are named you are placed inside a system. Historically, naming has served as a form of power enforcement: women taking names, and children being named. I wanted to write characters who are not neatly slotted into a social position. They’re adrift in some way. In A Separation, the narrator is both married and not married to the central male character. In Intimacies, everything about the narrator is provisional. The moment they’re named, they would fit into a rubric. [Pause.] I think it’s now done—in the book I’m writing now, the character is named. [Laughs.] 

At times, I wondered if the narrator of Audition is unhinged. 

Highly strung, I would say. But I’m really interested in widening the gaps between my intention and what the meaning of the book might be. My sense is that we all live with these narratives and these versions of ourselves that are in some way unstable and incommensurable. The two halves of the novel to me aren’t there to be reconciled—in the same way that within us there are different pieces of our lives that can’t really be reconciled. Sometimes that’s easiest to see in temporal terms—you might look back at a younger version of yourself and not be able to see it as continuous with who you are now. For many of us, it is simultaneous—you are a different person with different people. I wanted to take that feeling and take it up to a 10. 

Still, the quotidian and the mundane grounds Audition nicely. Tell us about the scarf. 

One of the things that was fun to play with was to have objects whose meaning changes across the two halves of the book. The scarf appears in the first half and in the second as a sign of attachment, but also of entrapment and a desire to keep somebody close who will not be kept close. So the person who is preoccupied with the scarf shifts from the first half to the second. 

In this novel, even the intimacy between the narrator and Xavier is incredibly freighted, beautiful, and in some fundamental way unreliable. I was interested in turning the apartment into a pressure cooker over the course of the novel. They are primarily in the apartment for much of the action in the second half. In this novel, it’s also intimacy as a form of performance and display, almost a form of aggression. Intimacy is a provocation in this novel, it is very much weaponized. 

Is your fiction anti-self-help? 

[Laughs.] Darian Leader, the English writer and psychoanalyst, told me he was asked, “What’s the use of psychoanalysis if it doesn’t make you better?” And he said, “It’s not there to make you better, it’s there to help you see reality.” Fiction is the same.

Karen R. Long is the manager emerita of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.