Audition

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