I found the style of this book highly annoying and coldly written. There are moments in the story that are lovely, almost flash-fiction pieces, but overall, I found it unengaging. ( )

I agree that this novel is well written, it has an interesting structure, and that its ambiguities and its characters’ unrestrained emotionality add some zing. The question is whether the novel shows me something about people that is true, despite its fiction, and whether this is meaningful or important to me. The answer is only maybe, so just four stars. What struck me the most while reading the novel is that this author was angry.

Spoiler
[ I guess there isn't a good way to reveal that a character is pregnant in any story, assuming that it isn't explicitly stated, without having a vomiting scene. This is such a cliche that if a woman vomits on television I immediately assume that she is pregnant. I hope that future mothers are aware that all pregnant women are not necessarily nauseated and that laboratory scientists are aware of the importance of their pregnancy tests. (hide spoiler)] ( )

I went into this book thinking that it was going to be a twisted tale about a meddling drama teacher. In some ways that is true, but throughout most of the book Mr. Kingsley, the aforementioned meddling teacher, remains somewhat of a shadowy figure. Rather, Choi delivers the narrative through Kingsley’s students, from their time both within and beyond the drama classroom.

In the first section of the book, we follow an angsty teen romance between two drama students. While it was fun to read about the inherent weirdness of drama classes and theatre training (took me back!), I was not feeling the gratuitous depictions of teen sexual encounters. This sex-saturated portion of the book attempts to depict the highs and lows of a teenager’s sex life, from steamy secretive hook ups to beyond-awkward drunken disappointments. Whether you enjoy this section of the narrative might come down to a matter of taste, but speaking for myself (from the perspective of a mid-Victorian grandmother), the explicit encounters prevented me from really enjoying the opening act of the book.

The second section of the book is a major departure from the first, as we return to the former drama students as adults from the perspective of a different character. Yes, my friends, this is one of those tricksy books with jolting narrative shifts that will undermine all of what you have previously read. This section features a much more competent and compelling character taking control of the narrative and it is in this section that the concept of “trust” is most fully explored. Though this is the strongest section of the book, it loses points for the narrator’s over-reliance on explaining word definitions and etymology. I get that writers are ~~wordsmiths~~ who are enchanted by language, but it can come across as a condescending move when you don’t “trust” your reader to understand your clever use of language without spelling it out.

(I guess I should mention there is a final third section, but it is much shorter and more basic than the other two. I get that it is essential to tie the narrative threads together, but I like the book better if I pretend it doesn’t exist!)

What’s strange about this book is that it is kind of destined for failure. I suspect that readers who enjoy the first part of the book are going to be much less interested by the second part and vice versa. The first part contains a strong sense of setting and character, but the plot feels much more conventional since it is centered around a typical high school romance. While the plot gets more interesting in the second part of the story, it also never quite delivers since this is more of a navel-gazey meta examination of storytelling, narrative, memory, and the trust relationship between the author and reader. As a reader, I found myself more engaged by the second half, but I was also always too aware of what the book was trying to do to ever truly lose myself in the story. ( )

Not always fun to read page by page—the long first section of the book doesn’t benefit from all the high concept hijinx that comes later—but a deeply engaging book. It’s a book that doesn’t really land fully until it’s over. There’s a lot of sitting with uncomfortable feelings after reading, which I admire deeply. In some ways, the implications of this book are so scary, it’s hard to express. Sexual abuse is so unmooring it can’t be spoken, can’t be narrated (can’t be prosecuted, punished, understood, prevented, stopped) ( )

***NO SPOILERS***

(Full disclosure: Book abandoned on page 61 out of 257 pages.)

It's so important to care about characters, really care, to be invested in what happens in a story. I couldn't have cared less about those in Susan Choi's Trust Exercise. In part one, the story is about high school freshmen David and Sarah studying drama in the early 1980s as they develop a romantic relationship. I couldn't get a solid grasp of just who these young teens are. Thanks to Choi's love of narrative summary, they're merely names on a page, not characters brought to life. There's little action and dialogue in Trust Exercise that would have allowed me to draw my own conclusions about David and Sarah and the peripheral characters. Instead in large blocks of text, Choi filled me in: their history, their thoughts and feelings, what they think of various other characters—everything. It's dispassionate, boring storytelling.

As for David and Sarah's relationship, it begins with a groping where the consent is questionable but that Choi presented as acceptable. From there the relationship is defined mostly by overly detailed descriptions of sex, which left a sour taste in my mouth. Teen sex is a reality, but there's something repellent about reading every detail of their encounters. A fade-to-black would have been more fitting.

As someone who loves stories set in academia, I looked forward to reading Trust Exercise, but it's firmly set in the world of drama students. I haven't studied drama extensively, which wouldn't matter if Choi hadn't described the classes in a way that only drama students could appreciate. For pages she described each aspect, no matter how small, of a trust exercise between David and Sarah. This scene is supposed to be tense, but owing to superficial characterization and Choi's failure to establish high stakes, it's instead tedious. David and Sarah aren't compelling.

The literati will probably adore Trust Exercise. Choi was a Pulitzer-Prize nominee for a previous work, and Trust Exercise is written in that introspective, artistic (and sometimes hilariously overwrought) style that makes snobby intellectuals feel smart for appreciating. They can have it. All other readers should look elsewhere.

NOTE: I received this as an Advance Reader Copy from LibraryThing in January 2019. ( )