Audition

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of pregnancy loss and emotional abuse.

The unnamed narrator and protagonist of the novel is an actress who attained professional success upon appearing in the film Parts of Speech, a fictional film directed by an artist named Murata. The success of the protagonist’s performance in that film enabled her to buy a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village neighborhood of New York City, which she occupies with her husband, Tomas.

The narrator is characterized by her impulsiveness, a trait that stems from her youth and manifests as curiosity and restlessness. Her curiosity compels her to meet with Xavier a second time, kicking off the events of the novel, and her restlessness motivated her infidelity in the wake of her earlier miscarriage. Because the narrator is constantly trying to perform a version of herself that matches her intentions, she discusses the ways in which she has been perceived and misinterpreted in both the past and the present. This habit arises from her career as an actress, in which she deliberates on the meaning and potential reception of every gesture and line before performing them. In Chapter 3, when Xavier repeats a gesture from one of her old performances, the narrator recalls her habit of using that gesture as a filler whenever she did not fully understood the character that she was playing.