Performance Art

There’s a striking moment in Katie Kitamura’s unnerving new novel, Audition, when the nameless protagonist, an actress, settles into the grooves of a challenging scene. Until this point, she has played her role with an intellectual dexterity that translated on the stage into an admirable but mechanical representation. When she finally nails the performance, she feels different. “It was that here,” the actress says, “that the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed and for the briefest of moments there was only a single unified self.”