Trust Exercise Questions an Author's Ability to Tell the Truth


Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise asks: how much should a reader trust an author’s interpretation of what happens in his or her characters’ lives? In a mind-bending work, Choi slowly explores the question via oftentimes annoying characters.

The book is divided into three section, each one a send up of the last, forcing the reader to ask how much of the previous section was real, how much was a faulty interpretation by the narrator? In the first section, we meet a group of teenagers enrolled in a small, elite performing arts high school in the American south. The teens come across as mature for their ages, gallivanting about town in cars and enjoying sex with different partners. In the next section, we learn that those characters from the first part of the book dwelled within a story written by another character named Sarah, and we then have the truths Sarah told us unpacked and called into question by another character named Karen. What is the truth?

By the book’s finale, a third voice has taken over the duties of truth teller, and the reader wonders if any of these narratives come close to what actually happened.

Choi manages to couch her questions about fiction comfortably in a generally familiar venue of a high school, which makes her attempts at getting the reader to question his or her willingness to trust an author easier to swallow. Choi, however, takes a long time to build the scenes, the setups, the relationships in sections one and two, which can make a reader wonder why they ought to care about Sarah and the rest of the characters at all, because they can read as dull or irritating. By the time a reader sees the questions Choi wants to explore, frustration may have already set in. It's hard to trust Choi with more of our time. 

Thank you to the Melrose Public Library for recommending Trust Exercise.  

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