Trust Exercise
by Susan Choi
Summary
In a hothouse performing arts high school in a sprawling Sun Belt city in the early 1980s, two freshmen, Sarah and David, fall into first love, consummate it over a summer, and are then broken apart and publicly vivisected by Mr Kingsley, the school's charismatic theatre teacher, who uses their heartbreak as classroom material in the trust exercises he conducts like a cult initiation. Choi renders the world, the ego work, the British visiting troupe, the adults circling the talented children, with total sensory authority, and for half the book the reader believes they are in an exceptionally good novel about adolescence and charisma.
Then the second section, titled Trust Exercise like the first, begins: Karen, a minor character in what turns out to have been Sarah's published novel, takes the narration, corrects the record, renames the names, and reveals the first half as a memoir strategically rearranged, its most consequential erasure being what actually happened to Karen herself, with one of those circling adults. Her section drives toward a piece of theatre and an act that is either justice or its impersonation. A brief third section, years later, shifts the ground once more, quietly devastating everything again.
The book's subject is exactly its method: who gets to tell the story of shared damage, and what the telling does to the people used as material.
Around two hundred and sixty pages.
Best for readers who want the unreliable narrator weaponized for the MeToo era, and do not mind a novel that pulls its own floor out, twice, on purpose.
Historical Context & Significance
Trust Exercise won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019, the most argued about win of its era in exactly the way the novel invites: readers split between those exhilarated by the structural reversal and those who felt the contract of the first half betrayed, and the disagreement was the reception. Critics framing it as the definitive MeToo novel had the timing right, Susan Choi had drafted the first section before the movement broke, and watched the culture catch up to her subject.
Choi, a Yale and Houston formed novelist whose American Woman had been a Pulitzer finalist, built the school from the performing arts high school she attended, and has been precise in interviews about the line between material and memoir, a distinction the novel itself exists to complicate.
Obama listed it among his favourites of the year; Garner at the Times did the same. The limited television series announced with Choi writing kept the book in the conversation, where its structure guarantees it a long argumentative life.