Audition (4*)

Novelist Katie Kitamura has written a feminist head-scratcher.

At first, the story of an aging, childless actress engaged me with spare writing (a real "palate cleanser" after Book of Numbers, that's for sure!) and knowing, subtle observations about gender.

Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.

Although the nameless narrator is happily married, she's dining with an attractive fan so much younger than she that she's sure strangers, including the leering waiter serving them, think he's a gigolo just as she was once mistaken for a prostitute when sharing a birthday meal with her elderly father.

He was young and had probably made his way through life seducing everyone around him, from his mother and father to his teachers and babysitters, a habit formed early in life. I fell regrettably in between roles, neither young enough to be romantic quarry nor prone to any maternal feeling.

Obviously, the narrator's self-consciousness and attunement to the reactions of the people around her has contributed to her successful, if fading career as an actress.  But as the book progresses, it's just as clear that her sensitivity has a down side, too: she clearly has to be center stage in her life, and seems more comfortable playing the role of a wife and mother than living it.

Ingeniously structured, the novel examines what it does and doesn't mean for a career-driven woman--some might call her selfish--to have a husband and child.  If the second half lands in slightly surreal territory, Kitamura still skillfully transforms the nightmare ramifications of living with an adult son into the kind of ego gratifying compensation that Mommie Dearest might have killed for.