Trust Exercise

Trust Exercise, recent winner of the National Book Award, is one of those books that takes a seemingly quotidian setting, in this case a high school for the performing arts, and turns it into something universal, mainly through florid prose. Susan Choi also has more surprises for us, as she bends reality, revealing in subsequent parts that we are not seeing the whole truth.

"Their own school was special, intended to cream off the most talented at selected pursuits from the regular places all over the city and even beyond, to the outlying desolate towns," writes Choi of CAPA, the school where the principals are students around 1982. The focus is on David and Sarah, who are an item (the explicit sex scenes are uncomfortable to read, given that they are fifteen), but they break up. Their teacher, Mr. Kingsley, is something of a philosopher king, and also openly gay and married, which would seem a bold thing in '82..

The second part of the book (all three parts are called "Trust Exercise") reveals that the first part was actually a book that Sarah wrote. One of the students she wrote about it comes to visit her at a book signing. This student, called Karen, still knows David, working as his assistant at a local theater company. This section varies in perspective, drifting from first to third person, creating a distance to the work. There is also a lot of foreshadowing, even going so far as to mention Chekhov's rule about the gun in Act One.

I won't reveal what happens in the third section, but it's more fulfillment of foreshadowing, and asks us to look back on what we've read and re-evaluate.

While there is some brilliant prose here, I find the book a bit too highfalutin for its own good. The first section, about the lives of teens in a performing arts school, worked just fine, but it feels like Choi didn't have an ending for it and decided to play around with the "truth." The last section really seems tacked on.

I didn't go to a performing arts high school, but I was involved in theater and a lot of it rings true, and this was pretty close to my era, too. The jealousies and pettiness seem right. Choi has her subjects having a lot of sex, too. Consider a passage like this: "Joelle’s enormous breasts are heavily freckled, their trapped clefts and creases are constantly sweaty; Joelle’s crotch, encased in her jeans, trails an olfactory banner like some sort of sticky night flower to inflame jungle bats." That could have been lifted from a Penthouse Forum letter.

The second section is much darker, and also includes several etymologies of words, which seems to be a result of Karen's hobby. I found this to be enlightening but also obvious, as if Choi were telling us what we were supposed to be thinking, based on the root meaning of a word in question.

Though it could be very annoying, I found enough of Trust Exercise to be worthwhile, and give it three stars. But I find it hard to believe it was better than any of the other nominees in the category.