“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi
I recently read and reviewed Flashlight by Susan Choi and was intrigued by her writing style even though not completely enamoured by the book. I noted she had won a National Book Award in 2019 for Trust Exercise and immediately decided to tackle her earlier effort. Hope springs eternal and I am always looking to discover the next great American novelist. Unfortunately, I had the same experience with Trust Exercise that I had with Flashlight. There is much to admire- it is ambitious, brilliantly written and confronts tough issues. Ultimately, it failed to capture me emotionally and I found the twists and turns in the plot line to be very disconcerting. I will be taking a “Choi” break for now. However, I don’t mean to discourage others from embracing her work. She is not a lightweight and others may be more comfortable with her quirky characters and gimmicky plot devices.
A quick summary of the plot and narrative structure here. Trust Exercise opens with what appears to be a straightforward third person narration set in the early 1980’s at CAPA, a prestigious performing arts high school in an unnamed Southern city. The first section focuses on Sarah and David, two fifteen year old theatre students navigating first love and sexual awakening. A charismatic teacher (Kingsley) creates a psychologically demanding environment that features exhausting emotional exercises designed to break down student defences. Sarah become obsessed with David, but otherwise struggles with the program. Choi also introduces a subplot involving Kingsley and a shy but talented gay Latino student Manuel. There is a strong overtone of sexual abuse. Finally, the section concludes with a visit to the school by an avant garden British theatre company. The two “stars” from England are Martin and Liam and they dominate the social scene. Sarah has intense sexual encounters with Liam that she frames as a passionate awakening but which read as physically aggressive and coercive. There is social interaction with Martin and another American student Karen, but that relationship is peripheral in Sarah’s consciousness. Sarah is the driver of the narrative in Section 1- her brief, passionate and failed relationship with David, followed by her fling with Liam. She also acts on her suspicion that Manuel is being sexually abused and he lives at the school. Here, she is the agent of social justice.
Halfway through, Choi executes her first confusing pivot in the narrative. Part 2 reveals that everything we read in Part 1 was actually a novel in progress written by Sarah- now a very successful middle age writer. Karen reads the manuscript and is furious. She believes that Sarah has placed herself at the centre of events where she was actually peripheral and has fundamentally misrepresented what happened during the English theatre group visit. Part 2 is Karen correcting the record. During the English actors’ visit, Martin- a decade older than teenage Karen- got her pregnant. Karen gives up her baby for adoption. Her baby was named Claire by the adoptive family. While Sarah was absorbed in her drama with David and Liam, Karen was experiencing exploitation and its consequences. Sarah, her purported friend, missed this series of events entirely. We then jump to a shocking climax in Karen’s narrative. We are now 20 years later. David has become a theater director- talented, a local lothario and a drunk. Martin has written a cutting edge play, but he has suffered professional disgrace in England for inappropriate sexual relations with a minor. David, as a rebel, chooses to direct Martin’s play in the United States. Karen, now an accountant for the theatre volunteers for her first ever theatrical role. To complete the circle, Sarah returns to witness the performance on opening nite. During the play in a scene calling for staged violence, Karen shoots Martin. The novel leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether this was an accident or intentional revenge. Choi leaves us hanging and refuses to clarify the situation in the balance of the book.
We then shift to Part 3 and experience another dizzying change of perspective. We meet Claire, Karen’s biological daughter, now an adult around 2010. Claire is investigating her origins and connects with the mysterious Robert Lord, an esteemed Professor at CAPA. Lord’s relationship with the original CAPA events is obscure, but his sexual assault of Claire extends the pattern of exploitation across another generation. The novel concludes at Robert Lord’s funeral, leaving multiple threads unresolved.
My assessment is that the book is an enormously ambitious failure. I read Trust Exercise in a single sitting, propelled by Choi’s extraordinary prose. She can write- her sentences crackle with intelligence and emotional voltage. The first section delivers vivid characters, psychological acuity and urges themselves to about institutional and sexual abuse. The writing is crisp and controlled. Sarah and David are interesting, particularly if you are in to teenage narcissism and Kingsley’s manipulation is devastatingly portrayed. He weaponies education and Sarah’s intervention in Manuel’s case shows the abuse was real and recogniable. CAPA’s culture is defective and disturbing. The revelation that Part One was Sarah’s novel was a shock. Karen’s description of the same series of events is eye opening and Choi is clearly suggesting that memories are tricky and subjective and that writing a history depends greatly on your point of view. Karen’s decision to act in a play written by her abuser creates psychological tension. Finally, the shooting itself is not a surprise since Choi clearly systematically crafts a narrative pointing to its inevitability. But the ambiguity is maddening. The return of David and Sarah is clever, but their relationship is unnerved. Finally, Part 3- the story of Claire, comes out of left field and was totally unsatisfactory.
Basically, the novel collapses under its own weight. I am a linear thinker and Choi’s three track narrative doesn’t work for me. Having delivered a devastating climax in Karen’s section, she abandons it entirely for Claire and Robert Lord- two characters who do not appear in the first 300 pages. We never learned what happened after the shooting. Was Martin killed? Was Karen arrested? What happened to David and Sarah? Will Sarah use these new developments in her next novel? The reversals and the twists feel borderline manipulative. Beyond the structural shortcomings, there is the deeper problem of Choi’s characters. Everyone is intensely self focused, absorbed in their psychological baggage to the point of narcissism No one is particularly likable. Sarah can’t see beyond her own drama. David is talented, but he is borderline pathetic. Karen remains opaque. They all process their damage endlessly without evidence of much growth. They may be realistic portrayals, but they are ultimately exhausting for me.
Choi’s prose remains her greatest strength. She posses genuine stylistic power. But prose cannot sustain a novel when the narratives’s structure collapses and its inhabitants are generally unpleasant. The play production with the shooting should have been an ambiguous and intriguing climax, not an abandoned plot point. The National Book Award judges clearly saw something that I don’t. I have now read two of Susan Choi’s novels and i am taking a timeout. I am very interested in what others think of Truth Exercise.
