Audition
Katie Kitamura
It’s impossible to talk about this book without mentioning The One Trick at its centre. You might say it’s a spoiler, so consider yourself warned.
The story is narrated by a nameless woman who works as an actor in a stage play. She meets a young man, Xavier, who claims to be her long-lost son and is seeking a reunion. But she maintains that she never had a son, having had a miscarriage earlier in her life. The third point in the novel’s central triangle is her husband, Tomas, whom she believes is suspicious about her meeting with Xavier because of her past infidelities.
Here comes The One Trick: halfway through the novel, we get a “Part Two” title page, and suddenly, Xavier is indeed her and Tomas’s son. He asks to move back into their home, and they have to re-adapt to his presence. This puts a strain on the family, especially later, when his girlfriend starts to live there too.
The book really drew me in because of how it confused me. Even before the Trick, it makes you question what is reality for the narrator.
Is she in denial about Xavier being her son?
Is she attracted to him romantically?
Is he a con man working a scam by getting close to her?
And of course, in the second half, the questions almost overwhelmed me.
Was the first half just a fantasy?
Are they all pretending to be a family for the sake of the play she’s in, a kind of extreme method acting?
Is she suffering from some mental illness or dementia?
Unfortunately, I didn’t think that there was a satisfying conclusion to the mystery. Based on the title of the book, I think the author’s intent is to show that we’re always “trying out” for the roles that we play in our relationships. We want to be true to ourselves, but we have to perform our parts, whether it be that of a spouse, a parent, or a child. I get it, but I don’t think that the Trick was needed to convey this point.
The book is quite thematically rich, and I think it’s a shame that the Trick distracts from the many profound ideas within. I was constantly preoccupied with trying to understand what was happening, looking for clues that might explain the plot, and I found myself rushing through my read, trying to get to the big reveal (which never came).
The setup of either of the two parts would have provided enough drama—about the boredom of a long-running marriage, about the paranoia that infidelity breeds, about the tragedy of pregnancy loss, about the transition of a child into adulthood—that it seems like a waste to obscure all that by mashing together two disparate realities.
