Fiction offers an experience of escapism from the real world. Attending that escapism instills a distance between reader and author, yet Susan Choi transgresses that understanding in her National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise (2019). Choi bends fictional conventions by breaking the reader-author contract and upending the reader’s understanding about her own made-up world.

        Trust Exercise features a strong, timely #MeToo message, while speaking directly to the lonely, the uncertain, and the unsettled, aligning with our current global health crisis. Without revealing too much, the title Trust Exercise should be taken quite literally; those who have faced difficult decisions and unpredicted circumstances in the past seven months, without the luxury of foresight or transparency, should be prepared to feel a similar sensation while reading this unconventional book. Luckily, this book operates differently from the incessant news notifications and health warnings, offering a totally made-up reprieve from the real world (though, the limits of “made-up” might be called into question).

        Choi’s novel, set in the early 1980s, centers around an ubiquitous performing arts high school with a fictional title—Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts (CAPA)—in an unidentifiable city in the United States; the only clue of its whereabouts is its characterization as a “little burg,” though the reader can surmise that the school was modeled after Choi’s own performing arts school, Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (the school’s location is just one of many non-answers in the novel). Students there, wrought with anxiety of the high school social stratum and the inability to fit in “seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.” These students are enraptured and driven by sexual desires and theatrical ambitions dangling just overhead. 

        Two of the students, David and Sarah, both fifteen-years-old at the start of the novel, fall deeply in love and deeply in heartbreak within the first 25 pages, and for the following 100, the novel focuses on their lust—and possibly love—for one another. Their gay, Godlike theatre teacher, Mr. Kingsley holds their theatrical fates in his hands, thus rousing an intimate bond as the students aim to please him. He weasels his way into their personal lives by giving the students incredibly manipulative trust exercises in class, including “silence, blindfolds, falling backward off tables or ladders and into the latticework of classmates’ arms.”.         This first part of the novel also entertains the arrival of a group of visiting artists, the English People, who alter the social dynamics and impressions of maturity in the young students: “the impression of power they gave seemed not wrought, but inevitable.” But, those first 131 pages constitute the extent of the normal narrative before Choi tests the reader with a trust exercise (or two).

        The second part requires patience and trust in Choi’s increasingly flux narrative as she pivots to an entirely new narratorial perspective: Karen, Sarah’s friend, who proceeds to debunk the events of the preceding pages. Karen—whose name is not actually “Karen”—reveals that the first 131 pages are from a book that Sarah—whose name is not actually “Sarah”—wrote. She reads the novel when they are both adults, and reveals that most of the events and characters from the book version of their lives are piecemeal, inaccurate representations of real life individuals and events. Karen expresses her disappointment in the lack of focus on her, ending her read—in an incredibly meta sense—on page 131, because “Karen certainly had no problem closing the covers on a book that … purged Karen in most ways that mattered.” After reading the first part, the section of Sarah’s book could very well have continued for the entire novel. The tone, style, and story shift completely when Karen takes over. In this second part, both Choi’s narrative and point of view are unfixed, so Karen (or the narrator, or whoever is the real “Karen”) switches between third-person and first-person narrative in an unconventional, experimental exercise.

        In her acknowledgements, Choi likens the experience of writing Trust Exercise to dreaming, and that is quite possibly the most accurate way to describe the read. She bends time, bends plot lines, and bends the conventions of a fictional narrative to the point where one must question whether Trust Exercise breaks more rules than it follows, and if it could even be considered a fully sound fiction novel. Thus, reading Choi’s novel requires a reboot, a return to the basics of fictional convention, in order to parse out how she stayed within the bounds of the genre and still managed to produce an award-winning book, while bringing readers along for a psychological rollercoaster.

        Perhaps Choi’s narrative construction might be understood by defining what literary theorists consider “fiction” through clues within the text. Choi points to the variability of fiction when Karen notes that the “Fiction” genre falls under a category, rather than a definition: 

A category is a way to define while a definition, according to the dictionary, is a statement of the exact meaning of a word. The dictionary tells us that fiction is literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people, is invention or fabrication, as opposed to fact. The dictionary tells us that the imaginary exists only in the imagination. Logic tells us that what exists only in the imagination does not exist in reality, or actuality, which the thesaurus tells us are the same thing.

So, is Choi saying that the reader should not accept fiction as reality, that the reader should not take her fiction as fact, and that fiction is just filled with lies? American philosopher John Searle thinks otherwise. In “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” Searle contends that narrative fiction finds inspiration in reality, but fiction in and of itself is not based in falsehood; fiction is just acknowledged as an entity that uses untruths: “What distinguishes fiction from lies is the existence of a separate set of conventions which enables the author to go through the motions of making statements which he knows not to be true even though he has no intention to deceive.” Searle concludes that fiction and lies do not go hand in hand, and that the author does not intend to deceive; yet, is that not exactly what Choi expresses in her novel?

        From a reader’s perspective, Trust Exercise does appear to be aimed at deceiving and bewildering the reader. First, Choi leads us to believe that, in Sarah’s version of the story, minor characters in the novel—Joelle, Julietta, Pammie, and others—are real characters that further the plot. Then, Karen’s retelling supersedes Sarah’s, and she tells us that those girls are all Karen, they just personify Karen’s different characteristics. For example, “Pammie … is not a historical person but the way in which Karen’s Christianity was found laughable.” This departure from the plot is exactly a form of deception and lies: Choi builds a relationship of trust with the reader only to reveal everything the reader believed in her fictional plot is later proven false, all within the confines of one work of fiction.

        Fiction, of course, can be composed of lies, and is, by definition, a lie, but with suspended disbelief, does the reader actually want to be let on about the extent of the lies they are being told within a singular work of fiction? Now the trust exercise comes in, and goes beyond trust falls and blindfolds amongst angsty teens: Choi has, in theory, bound herself to the reader with an invisible social contract, as classified by philosophers Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction and Literature, in which, quite like a performer-audience relationship, both are co-conspirators in the act of telling or receiving a fictive story. In The Encyclopedia of the Novel, Efraín Kristal goes further with this concept:

Fiction depends on cooperation, on mutually recognized conventions, on collaboration involving established practices and rules. In a fictive utterance the audience makes believe what it is being told; there is mutual knowledge that this is going on; and a disengagement from drawing inferences from what you are being told to what the writer or narrator actually believes, which is what Lamarque and Olsen mean by the “fictive stance.”

Kristal and Choi, then, are at odds with one another, right? Sure, the Karen narrative is still perceived as fiction, but Choi calls the fictive integrity of the Sarah narrative into question by shifting to Karen’s while breaking a mutual expectation with the reader to consistently believe the make-believe story. Karen says, flat out, “I’ve said I recognized myself in Sarah’s story easily: recognized as in ‘identified’ myself,” showing that she takes the fiction personally, on the scale of reality. Sarah’s narrative is believed to be the “fictional utterance” by both Karen and the supposed reader, but if Karen’s part of the story is not fiction to her, what is it considered? How does one make sense of the Karen iteration as a separate entity from the first part of the novel, but a part of the whole that is Trust Exercise? Not only does the perspective shift, but the narrator also becomes inconspicuous with a changing point of view between first-person and third-person in the Karen section, so this work does not consist of equal parts, nor does it continue the same (true) storyline.

        After the first 131 pages, the book almost seems finished, as if the second part is new and experimental, prematurely cutting off the story the reader was theoretically enjoying. So, what is stopping the reader from putting the book down once they arrive at the crossroads of the first Trust Exercise? That question might be answered by the electric quality of Choi’s prose that makes it almost impossible to stop reading the novel. In fact, this beginning chunk is the first break in a novel that otherwise plows at 100 miles per hour. Without chapters, Choi seamlessly glides through story upon story; resurfacing from the rush of her entrancing narrative feels quite like she felt while writing it, like waking from a dream. Beyond the prose itself, the undertones of a sexual abuse narrative between students and teachers invigorate the plot, and make its unconventionalities both worth the read and, in a way, fitting for a story that throws memory, time, and truth into question.

        One of Choi’s most compelling achievements with Trust Exercise is the #MeToo thread, which now categorizes this book among many modern fictional tales that address sexual assault. Perhaps this genre in and of itself can help explain the lack of explanation, the inconsistent storyline, and the unconventionality of Choi’s fiction.

Both of the central narrators in the novel (named Karen and Sarah, for the sake of simplicity) suffer sexual abuse, in ways both clear and obscure to the reader. One might presume that, deducing from Mr. Kingsley’s intimate relationship with and power dynamic over the students (on top of the way “he twinkled at them provocatively”) is an example of one; another more direct example lies in the two men (Martin, aged forty; Liam, aged twenty-four) who travel with the English People to visit CAPA and link up with Karen and Sarah respectively, both sixteen-years-old at the time.

        Age is an important factor in Choi’s story, as is the reliability (or lack thereof) of memory. At only 16, Karen and Sarah share keen desires and unchecked exploitation by older, more powerful men. Choi delicately straddles what the girls know and do not know about these harmful dynamics, though, undeniably, they wallow in this feeling of visibility, of being wanted, and “How proud [Sarah] feels, to command [Mr. Kingsley’s] attention.”

        Though the plot lines are twisted and the events blurred, Choi masterfully plays into the narratorial representation of a #MeToo moment. Maybe Karen revisits her past in Trust Exercise Part 2 to clarify or rethink her experiences as a teen. Maybe the past is rewritten so that those blurred moments can be powerfully reinvigorated in the present, and clarified as both harmful and valid. Maybe the truth in this fictional novel is hard to parse out for a reason. 

        In the 2018 essay “The Fall of Men Has Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Rebecca Solnit writes with disdain on the heels of the hearings for accusations of sexual misconduct by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s about the misbelief in women, and the inconstant conception of “fact”:

[Powerful men] don’t care what facts women have, because women’s facts can be gotten rid of, and indeed the whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or having believed them allow those facts to have consequences.

        Indeed, Karen and Sarah are women who may be in possession of facts, like Ford and countless survivors of sexual assault, but historically, women are less apt to be believed; luckily for the narrators of Trust Exercise, the stories from their point of view are inescapable, and the discomfort is palpable. Choi paints the men as villains and the girls remain “conscious of their tragedy” (207). The distressing part about this #MeToo novel is their helplessness, lack of understanding (at least in their teenage years), and the reverberations of the misconduct years later.

        Interestingly enough, Choi’s seemingly enigmatic narratorial style aligns with other works of #MeToo fiction, and serves a similar purpose, writes Parul Sehgal in The New York Times:

In several of these books, there is a fundamental confusion about what we are reading in the first place — is it a novel within a novel? Who is narrating? Do they have a right to the story? A striking number of these books — “The Friend,” “Asymmetry,” Trust Exercise,” “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Those Who Knew” — all involve a parallel plot, in which the story of a relationship, either lopsided or abusive, is juxtaposed with the story of a character who draws upon the experience of another in their own writing, often a tell-all.

Perhaps Choi knew exactly what she was doing in bending the conventions of fiction, in traversing a territory that might breach the author-reader contract, and in making her work akin to a dream, or even a nightmare. She wanted the stories to be self-aware, to lift off the page and inspire introspection in the reader; she wanted us to feel like out of place witnesses to something so behind-the-scenes and barebones it bordered on wholly up to interpretation. She wanted the book to not be real, but for the reader to find it hard to believe that it was not true; she wanted it to be so enthralling, so questionable, that it stuck long afterward. Choi did it. She checked off all the boxes. Yet, one can only wonder if she truly intended any of that, or if everything I told you was made up too.