January 1, 2025
Kitamura (author of the National Book Award-longlisted Intimacies) writes a novel built on an open question. Two characters meet for lunch. One is an actress, in rehearsals for her newest premiere. The other is an attractive young man who could almost be her son. Who are these characters, and how do they connect? Two stories play out and question truth, roles, and performance. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from February 1, 2025
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.
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March 1, 2025
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.
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