Trust exercise : a novel

by Susan Choi

Paper Book, 2019

Status

Available

Call number

FICTION Choi

Barcode

10187

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML: WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION "Electrifying" (People) "Masterly" (The Guardian) "Dramatic and memorable" (The New Yorker) "Magic" (TIME) "Ingenious" (The Financial Times) "A gonzo literary performance" (Entertainment Weekly) "Rare and splendid" (The Boston Globe) "Remarkable" (USA Today) "Delicious" (The New York Times) "Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed�or untoyed with�by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls�until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true�though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place�revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave listeners with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults. .… (more)

Media reviews

The Nation

The reward of Trust Exercise is the way in which this novel asks to be read: not necessarily with suspicion, but with attention to the process of sorting significant from insignificant details; attention to what information you need in order to consider a certain version of the truth authoritative.

— 13 more

The Irish Times

Perhaps the title itself is meant in an ironic sense but reading a novel is a sort of trust exercise in itself, the trust that the reader has in the writer to convince us that something that never happened actually did, and when our faith in the story is betrayed, the novel itself becomes damaged.

The Guardian Book Blog

Trust Exercise is marketed, accurately, as a #MeToo novel, and it shows with painful rawness how much damage can be wrought without anyone realising they are the victim. But this designation doesn’t capture the complexity of Choi’s investigation into human relations. What she’s done,

magisterially, is to take the issues raised by #MeToo and show them as inextricable from more universal questions about taking a major role in someone else’s life, while knowing that we’re offering only a minor part in return.

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Financial Times

The entire structure of the novel folds in on itself like a piece of origami, and what emerges is something sharp-edged and prickly: a narrative propelled by white-hot rage and the desire for revenge.

The Atlantic

And so what we’re left with, in the end, is fragments of testimony, each colored by its own particular kind of trauma, its own distorted perspective. And yet it’s possible to see all these elements independently and take away some kind of abiding reality that supersedes them all.

USA Today

So many books and films present teenage years as a passing phase, a hormonal storm that passes in time. Choi, in this witty and resonant novel, thinks of it more like an earthquake -- a rupture that damages our internal foundations and can require years to repair.

NPR Books

Choi's book isn't long, but its first half, the set-up for all that follows, feels long. Her construction, with its bottom-heavy foundation, raises issues about how long you want to hang around in a basement before ascending to floors with a better view — but it's worth hanging in there for her

payoff, which is certain to cast what preceded it in new light.

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Slate.com

Each of the novel’s three parts (the third is a relatively short coda) concerns a woman who feels betrayed, her trust violated—but the locus of that betrayal, the truly guilty party, looks different to the reader than it does to the women themselves.

Entertainment Weekly

Amid all this, Choi (who attended a similar high school) captures the competition between peers, the intense intimacy developed over long-hour days, the electricity of performances as they come alive for the first time. Intriguing characters are kept on the story’s margins, yet in so vibrantly

surveying this landscape, Choi gives each room to breathe — especially in the novel’s titular class exercises, realized with such dramatic muscle by the author that they’d do the ever-critical Kingsley proud.

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The Washington Post

This is the most precise skewering of a magnetic teacher since Muriel Spark’s 1961 classic. Choi’s voice blends an adolescent’s awe with an adult’s irony. It’s a letter-perfect satire of the special strain of egotism and obsession that can fester in academic settings.

The New York Times

Choi’s new novel, her fifth, is titled “Trust Exercise,” and it burns more brightly than anything she’s yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind.

Bookforum

Consider the latter half of the novel full of new perspectives on the material we’ve just lived through. The heat gets turned off, and in its place: analysis, in the guise of an adult voice that is shrewd and tempered—essentially the opposite of what we’d gotten comfortable with. What once

flew in the rarefied air of teen feeling plummets into the dark, petty, and mean streets of adulthood. If nothing else, this new voice is testament to Choi’s facility with voice—she can do it all.

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Kirkus Reviews, starred review

It is, until now, a straightforward story, capturing—with nauseating, addictive accuracy—the particular power dynamics of elite theater training. And then, in the second part of the novel, Pulitzer finalist Choi (My Education, 2013, etc.) upends everything we thought we knew, calling the truth

of the original narrative into question. (A short coda, set in 2013, recasts it again.) This could easily be insufferable; in Choi’s hands, it works: an effective interrogation of memory, the impossible gulf between accuracy and the stories we tell.

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Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Choi’s themes—among them the long reverberations of adolescent experience, the complexities of consent and coercion, and the inherent unreliability of narratives—are timeless and resonant. Fiercely intelligent, impeccably written, and observed with searing insight, this novel is destined to

be a classic.

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