Review by Booklist Review
In Kitamura's (Intimacies, 2021) mysterious fifth novel, a tale with two sides, an established stage actress fields the questions of Xavier, who, having read a profile which referred to the actress giving up a baby, thinks he might be her son. The actress strings us along, not instantly revealing how she and Xavier know each other but instead giving us cause to wonder about their relationship, just like the actress' partner, Tomas, and any stranger observing the older woman and younger man together might. While Xavier does resemble her, it's actually impossible that he is her son--the "giving up" the interviewer clumsily referred to was in fact an abortion. On the other side of the scrim, Part II, we return to the same characters and places but find things rearranged, players both more in focus and less so. Kitamura is a master of writing people who are both inscrutable and glaringly, psychically alive, which is to say real people, and obfuscation seems the point here, making this a perfect fit for readers of literary-puzzle novels.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kitamura (Intimacies) serves up a taut and alluring novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man. The unnamed narrator, a well-known theater actor, meets Xavier at a restaurant in New York City. Their first meeting took place two weeks earlier, and the woman doles out sparse and subtle clues in her narration, comparing her lunch with Xavier, now a college student, to one she had with her father in Paris. Kitamura keeps the reader guessing as to whether the characters are mother and son, lovers, or something else. Shortly after the lunch, Xavier becomes more involved in the narrator's life, working as an assistant for the director of a play in which the narrator stars. She reflects on her ambivalence toward motherhood and the long-ago miscarriage she had with her husband, Tomas, after which she had a series of affairs. About Xavier, the narrator is secretive not only with the reader but with Tomas, and his suspicion that they're having an affair threatens their marriage. In the novel's second half, Kitamura further complicates the narrator and Xavier's murky relationship. Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters' blurry boundaries. Readers won't be able to put this down. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Kitamura's (Intimacies) beguiling latest stars a celebrated, unnamed actress playing the role of a lifetime, though where her performance begins and ends is the novel's animating question. When we first meet her, she has been asked to lunch by a young, good-looking man she barely knows, Xavier. Who they are to each other is unclear, as is the reason he asked her to the restaurant. Then she sees her husband Tomas enter and promptly leave; what might he think he saw? A middle-aged woman, approaching the twilight of her career, indulging the attention of a younger man while managing the unseen fault lines of a quiet but complex marriage: the premise of countless literary works. But Kitamura chooses to upend everything in the novel's disorienting second half, adding blatantly contradictory elements (maybe Xavier isn't such a stranger) and a well-timed antagonist into the actress's life as her story creeps toward a brutal climax in the final act. As in her previous works, Kitamura's prose is hypnotic and finely observant, with a cool detachment that avid readers of Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy will recognize. VERDICT This sleek, provocative novel is sure to confound readers; a must for literary collections and for book club discussions.--Michael Pucci
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An older woman and a younger man struggle to grasp who they are to each other in a slippery and penetrating tale. This elegant knife of a story begins at a mundane restaurant in Manhattan's financial district, which the narrator hesitates to enter. Inside, she orders two gin and tonics over a strained lunch encounter with Xavier, who has said he believes he might be her son. The narrator is an actress of some renown rehearsing a difficult new play calledThe Opposite Shore. It isn't going well, and the actress realizes it falls to her to reconcile two impossible halves in its structure. As she fights through her dread, the novel launches Part II months later in the same restaurant, where Xavier and the actress are joined by her husband, Tomas, who toasts "the extraordinary success of the play." In this jarring reset, the trio is now a family, the play is now calledThe Rivers, and the novel is mirroring the irreconcilable halves the narrator sought to resolve on stage with her body and her art. Kitamura rewards close readers of this through-the-looking-glass disruption. So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences. When Xavier introduces his girlfriend, "Tomas took her hand in his, his smile already an embarrassment to us both." Kitamura's great theme, explored via two other nameless female narrators inA Separation (2017) andIntimacies (2021), is the unknowability of others. This novel posits that even within a family, each member is constantly auditioning. As the tension mounts, and the narrator's interpretation of events coils back and multiplies, she wonders "what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?" Over the shards of this realization, the shaken narrator and Xavier find "the possibility remained--not of a reconciliation, but of a reconstitution." The book ends as another play begins. In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
