- Acclaimed American author Katie Kitamura's new novel is brilliant, to say the least. It focuses on the precariousness of life and relationships. Everything is a play. We're all actors. But pretence can’t last. Playacting can’t last. We can play it hard of course but eventually we're exhausted.
- Then the quandary: what is the truth about us and our lives? Is it possible to get to the bottom of it?
- It's a 200 page novel in two parts. In Part One a middle-aged woman, who is an actress, meets a young student, Xavier, for lunch at a restaurant in the West Village in New York. Her husband Tomas, a writer, walks in, but suddenly leaves. He had come to the wrong restaurant. Did he see her there, with the young attractive man?
- Xavier had good reason to believe she was his mother. But she didn’t ‘give up a child’ as a journalist's article claimed. She had an abortion, we're told.
- She miscarried the second time, we're told. Her marriage was difficult. She had affairs, ‘an expression of restlessness’.
- Currently she's rehearsing for the main role in a play called Rivers, and she's struggling with the role of a woman who switches at a key moment between two different characters. She has to move from a woman in grief to a woman of action.
- In Part Two of the novel we learn that Rivers was a huge success, and her performance was enthusiastically celebrated by reviewers. But the story takes a shocking twist, which adds a whole new dimension to the novel. She is now continually referring to Xavier as her ‘son’ and she his ‘mother’. She even refers to Tomas as his ‘father’, and ‘our child’. Xavier, who has been promoted to the position of Assistant Director at the local theatre, ruptures their tired patterns. Like a kid coming into your life. There's a horror story element to it.
- She and Tomas agree to allow Xavier to stay in their large apartment ‘for as long as you like, it’s your home after all’. ‘I had a memory of the room in his adolescent years, a mess of dirty clothes and half-eaten sandwiches’.
- Tomas is enlivened by Xavier’s presence in their apartment. ‘…a loosening of the old habits and constraints that had drawn the boundary around this person and made him who he was’.
- Xavier asks if his girlfriend Hana can come live with him. Hana turns out to be a strong person. ‘He needs to grow up', she said of Xavier. And Tomas, 'an old man', seems attracted to Hana 'a young woman'. Another familiar pattern.
- Eventually the actress recognises that the story they are playing is a pretence. ‘…in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse’. She realises she has become, or was always, a woman who cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not real.
- Kitamura has written a provocative novel that challenges our ordinary patterns of life deeply. Acting, pretence, marriage, childlessness, loneliness, delusion.
- As I said, brilliant.
-(Unfortunately the novel is poorly edited. There are misplaced commas everywhere, and clumsy verbiage like this: ‘I was not indeterminate to myself’.)
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