The Booker Review

“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.”

The first thing that struck me about Audition is this: The first sentence is wholly ungrammatical. Serial commas separate whole ideas, and this stylistic choice continues throughout the book. I found this jarring. But perhaps that’s the point?

Audition is told in two parts. In some ways it is two stories, although it is also the same story.

In Part 1, a 49-year-old actress (unnamed) is approached by a young man named Xavier who mistakenly thinks she might be his birth mother. Her husband suspects her of cheating, and we suspect they aren’t happy. She contemplates her decision not to have had children. Then Part 2: We begin the story again. Same narrator, same placid husband, same Xavier – but this time he actually is her son. The three of them struggle to make sense of their family dynamic when Xavier moves back into the apartment.

If the start of Part 1 can be described as “disorienting”, Part 2 is something else – less ‘sliding-doors’ than ‘kicking-the-door-off-its-hinges’. Then lightly barbecuing the door in the middle of the theatre stalls, while the audience looks on, bemused.

“Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance is possible.”

I get the idea, I do. The way her story mirrors the play she’s performing, Part 1 ending with her struggling to bridge the two halves of the play, saying it’s as if the writer grew bored of her character at the halfway mark and wrote an entirely new one. Then we are suddenly catapulted into Part 2 where it’s actually as if… well, you get the picture.

But I don’t like it. While I find the idea interesting in theory, I found the execution of it feels – much of the time – vacuous and pretentious. It’s hard to feel anything for these characters. In my notebook while reading, possibly at the height of my irritation with the lack of plot and vapid character development, I wrote: “I feel like I’m swimming around in a muddy pond just bumping into random fish.”

I do sometimes wonder if what causes me to really dislike a book is, primarily, being already in a bad mood while reading it. And maybe that’s true. But mainly the feeling I was left with when reading Audition is similar to the feeling I experience in a modern art gallery. I once heard it said about modern art – you know, the unmade bed/ half a pickled cow type – that all the big emotions were already taken up by the Great Painters and so now all that’s left is the small emotions, like, a mild sense of unease. Slight disgust. This book feels like that. “Meh.”

One interesting aspect of the book is the nod to the identity politics of race. And as an aside here: I found that I had by default imagined each character as white, and experience some cognitive dissonance on discovering that they perhaps weren’t. Make of that what you will. On race, she talks a little of the burden of representation – of the audience members who approach her saying how nice it is to see “someone who looks like me” on the stage or screen – itself a new kind of invisibility, being reduced to a token type. The fact she remains unnamed throughout the narrative drives this feeling home, I felt.

I suppose, in the end, she seems like a woman uncomfortable with her own life. But then when her life is imagined totally differently we find she is just as uncomfortable with that, too. So I think that is what I will choose to take away from this sludgy reading experience: The grass is always more cinematic on the other side of the theatre.