Pip Adam’s boundless and mythic new novel, Audition (Coffee House Press; 217 pages), begins with three giants trapped on a spaceship, exiled from Earth. As they hurtle through space, Alba, Stanley, and Drew speak to each other; if they stop talking, their bodies will resume growing larger and, eventually, break open the ship. This opening section, consisting entirely of dialogue, is disoriented and disorienting. The trio struggles to describe their situation. “Are you getting bigger?” they ask each other. “Were we quiet and time has passed?” They can recall being in a classroom before being put on the spaceship Audition, but otherwise their memories are similarly fragmented, clouded, confused: “Have we had this conversation before?” “Were we always tall?”
The spaceship, the classroom, and the new planet where the giants land after the spaceship explodes serve as unfamiliar yet recognizable settings that provide Adam with unique entries into writing about prison abolition. In narratives about imprisonment, there exists the binary of being either inside or outside the spaces of incarceration, like the cell or the courtroom. But by beginning in space, Audition is free to move in a way that feels unrestricted and uncharted. The same is true of its characters. With minimal access to their identities and interiorities, the giants feel like planes or screens onto which their circumstances can be projected, reflected, refracted. What sits at the forefront of our relationship to them are the structural forces, primarily those of violence, acting upon them. Audition attempts to map the various facets and forms of that violence: violence inflicted by carceral punishment and confinement; violence stemming from substance use, from some innate human impulse, from habit; sexual assault, transphobia, racial violence, intergenerational violence; violence connected to rage, to exclusion, to grief. Violence in Audition is systemic but not systematized; it is a spored organism, rooting and rotting at every scale.
Gender also looms over the characters, as well as class. One section relays the giants’ time in the classroom where they were supposedly being taught how to run the spaceship. There we meet and follow Torren, a non-giant human employee who works with Drew, Stanley, and Alba. She struggles with the power she’s been given over her charges and with her complicity in their fates. Her complicity, though, is linked to scarcity—she could find “no other jobs.”
Like Kafka’s The Trial, Adam’s novel locates guilt within the bureaucratic machinations that create and then punish difference (thus creating even more difference). Subjected to incarceration, the giants’ bodies begin to grow; because they grow, the system further subjects them to its force. And if “structures” are forces or bodies that feel far beyond our control, amorphous and intangible, then abstraction seems a generative stylistic device for Adam. She experiments here with voice, non-linear plot structure, and time.
Adam’s previous work is similarly interested in the friction between people and structures. The New Animals (2017), which won the 2018 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, examines the fashion and beauty industries. Her story collection, Everything We Hoped For (2010), which won the 2011 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction, is set among rehabilitation centers, local jails, and the days and nights of new motherhood. Nothing to See (2021) explores labor and surveillance capitalism, and I’m Working on a Building (2013) also explores labor, particularly in the context of climate and the climate crisis; the main character is an engineer on a project to build an exact replica of the world’s tallest tower atop a fault line. The tower in I’m Working on a Building mirrors the spaceship in Audition: an object of human construction at the center of the story, functioning asa container for the narrative’s allegorical and metaphorical material.
Among that material is an examination of contemporary surveillance. While confined in the spaceship, the giants compliment it constantly: “They really have done nice job with the ship,” “It really is a lovely ship…We all think it at the same time.” They express praise over and over as if they might be heard—either by the spaceship itself or perhaps by someone on Earth monitoring the ship. Such repetition recalls Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon—a prison’s central watchtower—and the related theories of Foucault and others. Only here it is sound, not sight, that functions as the mechanism of control.
At the same time, sound is what the book offers as a sort of salvation. When the trio arrives on the new planet they are greeted with new sounds, a “beautiful sound.” It is through speaking to each other that they achieve clarity of memory, of thinking and feeling. While incarceration has estranged them from each other and themselves, talking facilitates reconnection. “Don’t go silent—we were so stupid to go silent. Make noise and listen,” says Alba to the others. Listening and speaking, she asserts, are not mutually exclusive but inexorably linked and deeply necessary. Both wry and somber, Audition insists on the conversation, that the way toward and through change is fundamentally communal.
Angela Davis writes of prisons, “It is difficult to imagine life without them.” But Pip Adam’s novel steps up to and into this task, the title encapsulating this endeavor: Alba, Stanley, and Drew together audition a new civilization, a new way of being. Adam’s book should be read not as a call to escape or abandon, but as a reminder—and perhaps a way—to return.
Annie Delmedico is an Editorial Assistant at ZYZZYVA. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Bennington Review, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Sundog Magazine, and Wigleaf’s 2024 Top 50 Very Short Fictions.