Doing nothing to improve the reputation of philosophical novels

There are a lot of people who, typically as a result of their own ignorance, tend to dismiss philosophy as navel-gazing solipsism. The immediately flippant counter to these people is that just because what they see when they look at their own existence is limited, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who can see more and do more than they can. The wider argument is much too big for this review, and I’m not qualified to do it justice. Why am I babbling about straw men without mentioning what I’m meant to be writing about? Well, because Katie Kitamura has produced, for her fourth novel, a book which places great weight on its own philosophising, and which sadly does a pretty awful job, thereby giving fuel to the fire of people eager to dismiss philosophy and the philosophical novel as pointless. Really, they just need to read better philosophical novels.

Anyway, Audition gives us the stories (I use this term deliberately and loosely) of an unnamed female actress in middle age, divided into two parts by a plot shift that isn’t really a plot shift because there isn’t much of a plot and the gap is never justified or explained. Let me elaborate. In part 1, our narrator retells a meeting in a restaurant with a handsome young man who everyone – including the narrator’s husband who randomly walks in and out – believes is the narrator’s lover, but who is in fact under the misapprehension that he is the narrator’s child. He’s not, for incontrovertible reasons. Then, in part two, he is. Why and how? Well, I don’t know. He just is. The first part of the novel is never referenced again; the second part tells a nebulous story of family reunification followed by division which is never fleshed out, and which culminates in the son writing a one-woman play about ‘A woman who can no longer distinguish what is real and what is not real’.

If we’re being generous, we can say that the novel asks questions about the performative nature of family relations, and the fictionality of the stories we live and tell ourselves. The problem is that these aren’t questions that haven’t been asked before, and the manner in which they are asked here is superficial and uninteresting. And if the purpose of the first part of the novel is to show us that made up stories are made up, well, I’m not really sure anybody needed to learn that. Of course, as with everything in literature, so much can be forgiven if the writing is beautifully sharp or the characters resonant or the plot engaging. No such luck here, so no forgiveness either.