Overview
WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"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, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781250309884
- ISBN-10: 1250309883
- Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
- Publish Date: April 2019
Related Categories
Trust Exercise
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is not exactly what it seems. Though the story explores the ways adolescent experience reverberates through adulthood, it also brilliantly topples all expectations of narrative fiction.
The novel opens in the mid-1980s at an elite high school for the performing arts, where students compete for roles in a rarefied bubble of camaraderie and pressure. Two rising sophomores, David and Sarah, have an intense sexual relationship over one summer, which ends shortly after school begins. Their bitter breakup and estrangement become the talk of their classmates, and even their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, seems obsessed as he invites Sarah to confide in him and continues to pair the two teens in classroom exercises. When a British director brings his troupe of young actors to the high school for an ill-fated production of Candide, Sarah is drawn into a hapless relationship with the production’s star while her bland classmate Karen pines for the group’s louche director.
Just when this hothouse atmosphere gets a bit too stifling, there is a shocking spiral of events that ricochets the action into the future and completely transforms the premise of the novel. What readers may have believed to be true about David, Sarah and Karen may not be true, but it may not be completely false either. It is not until the final pages of the novel’s short coda that another layer of events is uncovered and the complete picture falls into place. Or does it?
Trust Exercise questions the very nature of fiction, and in a novel that depicts the fluctuating power dynamics between parents and students, students and teachers, and men and women, it suggests that the one who has the most power is the one who remains to tell the final version of the story.
We trust novels to tell us a story exactly the way it happened, but fiction, Choi suggests, has its own rules.
Trust Exercise
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is not exactly what it seems. Though the story explores the ways adolescent experience reverberates through adulthood, it also brilliantly topples all expectations of narrative fiction.
The novel opens in the mid-1980s at an elite high school for the performing arts, where students compete for roles in a rarefied bubble of camaraderie and pressure. Two rising sophomores, David and Sarah, have an intense sexual relationship over one summer, which ends shortly after school begins. Their bitter breakup and estrangement become the talk of their classmates, and even their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, seems obsessed as he invites Sarah to confide in him and continues to pair the two teens in classroom exercises. When a British director brings his troupe of young actors to the high school for an ill-fated production of Candide, Sarah is drawn into a hapless relationship with the production’s star while her bland classmate Karen pines for the group’s louche director.
Just when this hothouse atmosphere gets a bit too stifling, there is a shocking spiral of events that ricochets the action into the future and completely transforms the premise of the novel. What readers may have believed to be true about David, Sarah and Karen may not be true, but it may not be completely false either. It is not until the final pages of the novel’s short coda that another layer of events is uncovered and the complete picture falls into place. Or does it?
Trust Exercise questions the very nature of fiction, and in a novel that depicts the fluctuating power dynamics between parents and students, students and teachers, and men and women, it suggests that the one who has the most power is the one who remains to tell the final version of the story.
We trust novels to tell us a story exactly the way it happened, but fiction, Choi suggests, has its own rules.