Audition Review

I started reading Audition at 6 pm on the bus that took me to the subway. I continued reading on the F train, where there was a shirtless man roaming across subway carts and yelling obscenities. He was holding an empty red crate and a fork. His yelling was incoherent until he said clearly, and to no one in particular, “I’ve never killed anyone before”.

I was doing that thing where you act dissociative and nonchalant so that the threat disregards you. It’s important not to fully disassociate, though, or you promptly become the most vulnerable target. I was also simultaneously making brief bullets of eye contact with those around me, specifically women, so they knew we were complicit in our fear.

Because of the performance I was putting on for the shirtless man, I had been reading and re-reading the same line for several minutes. To me, this was usually a telltale sign that a book was bad. Either the sentences had confusing syntax, or I was bored and thus stuck on a line. But this book was not bad. On the contrary, I was desperate to finish the page and keep reading, but I was also desperate not to be forked.

The man eventually left, fork and all, and I allowed myself to fall into the book. In a weird way it was the perfect atmosphere to read it. The energy around me paralleled the book’s—I felt certain that the narrator could have easily been sitting beside me. What I’m getting at is, this book is the type of book that inserts you with force into its ambience, into the sticky, eerie air. It's the type of book that puts a filter on everything you see, even after taking your eyes off the page.

The novel takes form in two parts. And this decision sets up its thematic heart: how we understand the roles we play in everyday life. It is a meditation on voice, agency, and performance.

Goodreads summarizes it as:

“One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, and young-young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him?”

Audition challenges the idea of self and performance. Using theatre as a larger metaphor for how we perform in our everyday lives. The idea of “front self” and “back self” is at the forefront of your mind as the story unravels. She examines how voice can be both revealing and withholding.

Her writing is incisive and deeply observational. It focuses on the physicality of human interaction and how each moment might be perceived in contrast to the intention behind it. In this aspect, I found the writing resembled a pleasant cocktail of Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk—two literary geniuses that I love.

While the book baffled me in many moments, I am easily entertained by absurdity, and could not put it down. It is a character-driven novel where not much actually happens. But all the while, each minor moment was crafted so intentionally that it wound up profound nonetheless. It is rare to find a character-driven novel that is so compelling.

I started the novel at 6 pm on the bus and finished it the following morning at 10 am. 5 stars.