Katie Kitamura Plays Her Part

Katie Kitamura has been meaning to try the pastries at Lafayette — a grand cafe and restaurant just north of SoHo, not far from where she teaches in the creative writing program at New York University. Before she had kids, she would get dinner here with friends; now, she arranges breakfast dates here. But the baked goods, displayed behind glass at the marble-lined coffee counter, she’s never had. Now’s her chance.

She tears bite-size pieces off of her artisanal croissant, neatly dissecting its flaky layers. When she’s about halfway through, I ask for the verdict. “Really good,” she says, laughing. “It’s really good.”

The occasion for the long-awaited croissant-tasting? We’re here to discuss Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, in which Lafayette features as a setting (albeit unnamed). In the book, the cafe appears, unnamed, as a post-theater destination. Kitamura’s narrator, also unnamed, reinvigorates her acting career in middle age with a hit play, and she, her collaborators, her husband, and their maybe-son (more on that later) gather regularly for wine-soaked dinners after curtain call. “My [actor] friend had said, ‘That’s so funny that you always go to Lafayette, because that’s where we always go after a show,’” Kitamura tells me. “And they have loads of pastries the characters are constantly eating. It’s kind of overdetermined pastries. The pastries, they kind of take on this almost horror-movie quality. They keep recurring.”

Indeed, the narrator makes a daily trip to fetch baked goods for breakfast in what at first appears to be a seemingly innocuous chore that emerges to be freighted with meaning, proof of her continued commitment to her husband. Every morning, the pastries. Repeating, ritualizing, circling: This is the psychological dance Kitamura’s characters enact with one another, in all of her novels. Like celestial bodies in orbit, while their bonds might appear fixed, they’re always just one well-targeted asteroid away from changing course. In this case, that asteroid is Xavier, a mysterious young man who, at the beginning of the novel, believes the narrator to be his birth mother — and, at the book’s midpoint, tries that role on for size. Despite eschewing a traditional plot, Audition is propulsive — it has the energy of a merry-go-round gone wild, torn loose from its base but continuing to spin. I devoured it in one sitting.

In many ways, Audition bears a similarity to Kitamura’s past two novels, 2021’s Intimacies (named a New York Times Top 10 book of the year, and longlisted for the National Book Award) and 2017’s A Separation (lauded as a best book of the year by the NYT, NPR, The Guardian, and more), which also feature unnamed women narrators navigating complex relationships and are similarly interested in performance. But while those two books centered on translators — and, inevitably, what slips through the sieve of language — Audition takes the author’s interest in role-playing to its logical conclusion by focusing on the theater world. It’s also set in New York, where Kitamura lives with her husband, the author Hari Kunzru, and their two children. Despite all the dissimilarities between Kitamura and Audition’s narrator, that one resemblance could be enough to prompt comparisons.

A Separation, Kitamura notes, was sometimes described as autofiction — despite the fact that the narrator’s husband (spoiler) winds up dead and Kunzru is, in fact, still alive. “Even I know better, but I still do it a little bit,” she says of the narrator-author conflation. “If I’m reading something in first person, I find myself — in the back of my mind, there’s a little bit more of a tether to the author, even though I know better from firsthand experience… So I think it’s a natural in a reader. And also, I am in those books. You’re in all your books.”

If I had extrapolated an authorial persona solely from Kitamura’s novels — replete as they are with piercing observations, with relationships built on quicksand — I might have imagined a cipher, cool-headed and ever so slightly intimidating. But that’s not the woman I met at Lafayette today at all. She’s easy to talk to, and laugh with. She dispenses pearls of wisdom, but always with caveats — one pearl does not fit all.

Kitamura’s long been averse to backstory, arguing that people aren’t reducible to their pasts; moment to moment, we’re all liable to change, shift, surprise ourselves. And yet, so many of us remain convinced of our fixedness, determined to connect the dots, to see ourselves in archetypes. “A lot in the culture encourages you to think in that way,” Kitamura says. “The kinds of social roles that we play have very, very fixed parameters. Even narrative tends in that direction. If you think about the way people consume popular stories like Sex and the City or Harry Potter, for example — the way it often becomes, you sort yourself into a type.”

The kinds of social roles that we play have very, very fixed parameters.

She hesitates — ever thoughtful, ever empathetic. “I think there’s perhaps a reduction, but also a kind of reassurance and comfort in that, in the sense that especially if you’re trying to figure out who you are, it can be useful to have an archetype,” she says. “I see that with young people. Even my son is like, ‘Do you think it’s better to be a jock or a nerd?’ It’s like, ‘Well, you can be both or neither.’” And even if you’re the picture of a four-eyed academic or a jacked sportsman, odds are that on closer inspection, complexity emerges. “What I’m interested in as a novelist is the point at which [archetypes] become restrictive and they don’t contain everything that a person is, and the messiness of people starts to seep through the cracks,” Kitamura says.

This sentiment echoes another insight Katamura shares — that even though she didn’t set out to write a pandemic novel, it snuck its way in. At one point, Audition sees four people sharing a two-bedroom apartment, challenging one another for precious square feet of territory. “Even if you’re not writing directly about the political situation, the novel, every novel, is an artifact of the reality we’re living in,” she says.

Throughout our conversation at Lafayette, the reality we’re living in reasserts itself. For long stretches, we’re able to stick to the topic at hand — Kitamura’s life and work, the literary sphere more broadly — but inevitably, we return to politics. The high-minded conversation, the cozy wooden banquette, even the pastries — the trappings of bourgeois society aren’t enough to keep our minds off of the looming constitutional crises, the threat of censorship, the markets in freefall. (It’s the day after Liberation Day, and we’re being liberated from our 401(k)s as we speak.) “In my work, I’m really interested in ideas of performance and the way performance becomes a reality in and of itself. It becomes its own force field. And that’s really what we’re seeing — Trump’s capacity to alter the world, to suit the fantasy that he’s spinning,” Kitamura muses.

That’s really what we’re seeing — Trump’s capacity to alter the world, to suit the fantasy that he’s spinning.

Is it strange, I ask, to be playing the Author on Book Tour as the world burns? “Very weird,” she says with a nervous laugh. “I suppose the positive thing is I don’t have very much anxiety about this publication because all of my anxiety is being eaten up and generated by the world.”

Though, even in the best of times, Kitamura’s not particularly comfortable inhabiting the role. Being cast as the expert, imbued with authority — it doesn’t sit well with her. “My books are really about not knowing. They’re about undermining authority,” she says. “I don’t know. I muddle along. I do my best. I try to do the performance of it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily all that convincing.”

I look at her across the table. Eyes bright and curious, smile earnest. Fingers tearing at what’s left of the croissant. Whatever her misgivings, the shoe fits.