“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi (book review)
“I don’t think character exists anymore,” the novelist Rachel Cusk declared in a discussion about fiction writing at a 2018 reading at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. Pressed to explain, she described “a homogeneity afoot that I think everyone would accept in terms of our environment and how we live and how we communicate, and those things seem to be eroding the old ideas of character.” Maybe (though how debatable!), but what still exists is consciousness: we perceive our experiences through distinctive scrims, and two people can have completely different versions of the same event, with such different emotional colorations you can’t believe they experienced the thing side by side. This is Susan Choi’s subject in her latest novel Trust Exercise – how experience becomes contested territory as people attempt to forge their selves out of what they’ve determined is the correct version of their past.
Like Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Trust Exercise is partly about the writing of itself, with characters’ realities being questioned by other characters, a feature that works especially well since the subject matter is high school and who remembers high school? Events are recalled through the haze of drunkenness; parties blur together in people’s minds. Not only are facts unstable in Choi’s novel but the tellers are peculiar, something we don’t grasp until the second narrator takes over, throwing light on the first. It dawns on us, since the poetry is leeched from the language, that we really were listening to a writer, before. But also, observations and even characters become so different, we understand reality is only ever an interpretation.
Choi, who’s written novels based on Patty Hearst and Ted Kaczynski, is here interested in young people. Sarah, David and Karen, high school students at a performing arts school, are in thrall to their charismatic theater teacher, Mr. Kingsley, who guides his students through emotionally revealing “trust exercises.” Teen love, insecurity, artistic striving, and other obsessions of youth are all grist for the mill. Nothing in his students’ personal lives seems off-limits to this seasoned practitioner of the arts (who was in the original “Cabaret” on Broadway) and the students accept the idea that authenticity in art is reached through self-exploration, even if done in public. So it is that Sarah and David’s brief, intense romance becomes a subject in class, with Mr. Kingsley using various formulas to try to break through their defensive walls. They are too young to question the judgment of this self-possessed leader — they’ll follow him anywhere.
Mr. Kingsley belongs to an earlier era of teachers, long before Mary Kay Letourneau brought the wrath of a nation onto her head by sleeping with her 6th grade student; way back in an era swathed in cigarette and cannabis smoke, when getting trashed wasn’t just accepted but almost a moral imperative. Back then some teachers went drinking with their students, got high with them, sometimes got sexually involved with them and even married them — in many cases without making headlines or losing their jobs.
Now when teachers traduce these boundaries it’s cause for immediate dismissal, if not jail time. But then, oh then. It was a matter of character, pace Cusk — not moral character but being a character, which Choi sharply conveys: “Mr. Kingsley was impossibly witty and sometimes impossibly cutting; the prospect of talking with him was terrifying and galvanizing; one longed to live up to his brilliance and equally feared that it couldn’t be done.”
With the charismatic teachers we gravitated to in the 70s, it took a strong student to object to a hand on their knee. It was more common to thrill to the touch and hope it was leading to more. (Crossing boundaries was the point.) Choi explores the blind faith of the young who never imagine experiences will end up affecting them forever — instead they jump in random cars, take off to parties, wake up in strange bedrooms, and don’t pull away from advances from older people. They haven’t been trained to see these approaches as qualitatively different.
Choi’s last novel, My Education, was about a passionate affair a young graduate student has with her professor’s wife. Strangely, it was a less involving novel than her two previous ones because the theme of youthful erotic passion didn’t yield the dimensions that characterize her other books. With American Woman and A Person of Interest, Choi penetrated into mysterious private domains — the watchfulness of a committed woman radical, the irritable sensibility of an octogenarian math professor who turns out to have the office next to the Unabomber (Person of Interest). These subjects, with their added social dimension, caused Choi to stretch her imagination and her prose, always poetic, responded to the strange territory with new flights. With Trust Exercise she resumes some of her nervy, chance-taking writing but now it is formal audacity that pulls her out of her shell — the second half of the novel is a departure from the reasonably coherent, though not always straightforward, first half. Suddenly Choi is playing with point of view, switching from first person to third mid-page, or even mid-paragraph. It’s disorienting, not always successfully, but it does pull our attention to the writing of the story instead of the story — a Brechtian nudging that forces us to question everything we’re reading.
Through these ricocheting perspectives we absorb Choi’s point about memory: a person who was of glancing importance to you to the point you can barely recall their name might have been obsessed with you throughout high school. The narrator of the first half of Trust Exercise turns out to have been crucially significant to the hapless narrator of the second half. These cruel disparities are part of life in general, of course, but excesses of youth heighten them even further. In the same vein, a sexual experience with a much older man can be a formative experience for a young girl and an insignificant one for him, at least in the girl’s telling of it. In a way, all of the novel is concerned with what impulsive encounters mean: “Perhaps first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached,” Karen fumblingly thinks as she tries to parse her painful experience.
Each character weights their experiences differently, shading our response to them. Karen’s attention goes to such different places than Sarah’s that we feel concerned for her: she talks about words, but not the way a writer does — she’s trying to pin them down, as if reality is too slippery for her so words must become obedient. In this passage, current-day Karen thinks about her frustrations with her high school friendship with Sarah: “…despite the ample evidence of Sarah’s inability to grasp her, Karen’s, feelings. Synonyms for ‘ample’ include ‘bounteous,’ ‘copious,’ and ‘plenteous’ but not, according to this particular thesaurus, ‘voluminous.’” At another point Karen has these thoughts about a bookstore’s signage: “‘Art,’ ‘Humor,’ ‘Essays,’ ‘Reference,’ and ‘Fiction’ were the way certain books had been categorized in the bookstore.… A category is a way to define, while a definition, according to the dictionary, is a statement of the exact meaning of the word.” Yikes. Passages like these make us realize Karen isn’t equipped with the imagination to deal with well, anything, really. As her character slowly emerges we realize she’s a severely limited person who managed to get by in high school, and she just happens to be a character in someone else’s story.
Choi is the master of a deft insight: “Karen’s true adult life began when she recognized she was a child,” she writes. Her writerly judgment seems off, though, in the first part of the book where she spends too much time rendering the drama class trust exercises in repetitive detail, puzzling given how economical she is elsewhere. There could have been more time spent on the students’ relationships with Mr. Kingsley, instead, though Choi’s decision to keep him in the shadows makes some sense given his elusive status as a both an adult and a cult leader.
It’s mostly consciousness that concerns Choi, though, and her characters’ later adulthood as formed by their early, agonized experience. Her technique is compelling: holding different parts up curiously, commenting on literary devices (“the author would like to indulge an adverb”) and revealing results of youthful rashness with her technique of tumbling perspectives and details coming out at different times, the way a memory will recur vividly occasionally when other times only exist as a flickering icon of itself — a memory of a memory.
As we follow these competing perspectives, Choi builds sharp suspense in the novel. This is not just a novel about consciousness, it’s a novel about justice. Like a good play, the action builds toward a terrible inevitability and there’s also a last-minute surprise — almost like a theatrical device. With its overarching theme of distorting memory, Trust Exercise has at its core a scenario — actually, several — that the recent #MeToo movement would call out as abuse. And it’s the work of this book to escort its young minds — filtered through the perspective of grown minds — to a sense of reckoning. In the course of this, ways of telling a story are interrogated, as is the right to who gets to tell the story, and how. One character objects to the way she is portrayed in someone else’s narrative but even more to the story the person chose to tell: “What really pissed me off … is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth.” Is her anger justified? We have no way of knowing, since “knowing” has been so expertly undermined by Choi.
A coda, though, suggests the events might have been more conventional than the initial narrative suggests. Without the gilded feverish gaze of youth, the actions of older men toward the very young seem clear to us. The concept of peril is clear. And the sense of progress, the feeling that a new idea of equality has nosed its way into our cultural understanding however faultily, is only a glimmer but a most welcome one.
