AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

I really liked A Separation, and I loved Intimacies, but this book I just didn’t get.  It’s a head-scratcher, for sure.  The novel has two distinct and somewhat contradictory halves, just like the play that the narrator is starring in.  Both halves involve three characters—the narrator, her husband Tomas, and a young man named Xavier whose looks and mannerisms are very similar to the narrator’s.  The first half ends with sort of a cliffhanger, in which Tomas texts the narrator that they need to talk.  Then the second half begins, and it is completely inconsistent with what we understood from the first half.  What do we have here?  A highly unreliable narrator, for sure, but is she also delusional?  While the first half is taut and fraught with unanswered questions, the second half eventually gets crazily out of hand when a fourth character, a young woman named Hana, joins the cast.  She is the catalyst to a bizarre family dynamic.  The title also has me baffled, although I did wonder at times if the two halves were supposed to be different versions of the same play.  The saving grace here is Kitamura’s fabulous writing, but I just wish she had tied up the loose ends of the first storyline instead of abruptly starting a second one that weirdly intersects the first but then veers off in a completely different direction.