Title & author
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Synopsis
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi appears to be nothing but unreliably narrated, the title acting as a blatant hint to what the reader can expect. What emerges is a powerful address of sexual violence and the Me Too movement.
Who should read this book
Fans of The Interestings and We Were Liars
What we’re thinking about
How we decide who to trust
Trigger warning(s)
Sexual violence, substance abuse, self-harm, sexism, mental health
What is an unreliable narrator? Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, even Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov -- all these characters distort reality, bringing readers along with them on their misleading account of events. But what is the point of a narrator lying to their audience? And if the reader is not lying, rather it is their audience that doesn’t trust them, how do we respect the truth? Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (Henry Holt, 2019) appears to be nothing but unreliably narrated, the title acting as a blatant hint to what the reader can expect. What emerges is a powerful address of sexual violence and the Me Too movement.
“Neither can drive. David turns sixteen the following March, Sarah the following April” (Choi, 1). Set at a performing arts school in a suburban town, readers are immediately introduced to the young age of the characters. Yet “they were both experienced-- neither was a virgin” (2). While both characters are only 15, their sexual experience is also introduced within the first few pages of the text. This depiction ages them, encouraging readers to view them as more mature than their actual age. In fact, during their theatre exercises, “crawling, then: touching. Not tolerated but encouraged. Maybe even required” (4). Sexuality is normalized, but to the point where characters are dismissive of sexual boundaries altogether.
The three-part novel begins with Sarah, who often cannot find the words for what she wants to say. “Two rows in front of David, aching with the effort of keeping perfectly still so his gaze, like a moth, won’t take flight from the back of her neck, Sarah doesn’t know the words for this language that doesn’t have words” (17). However, her lack of words is used against her. When Liam “jammed his tongue into [Sarah’s] ear...he talked constantly, mostly incomprehensibly” (114, 115). Sarah’s inability to speak reads even louder as she is sexually assaulted by a vocal, twenty-something year old man during a high school party. He alters her silence, taking “her gasp as a sign of excitement” (115). How quickly her lack of words is used against her, mutated into something to reinforce the man’s actions and desires. And afterwards, as a friend’s mother talks to her “in her tireless, musical voice,” Sarah is silent, “too tired to answer or move or to flinch, ” but her body “crav[ing] the annihilation of hot water and soap” (130, 131, 129). Her silence, no fault of her own, allows another’s story to take the place of her’s. Liam’s story becomes reality, swallowing her own whole, erasing it. And because we as readers have internalized her maturity, not her underage status, we are encouraged to dismiss her story, too. To move on. In our minds, she is an adult.
At the start of part two, the shift into Karen’s point of view forces readers to perform a trust exercise; we must fall into the story’s arms, letting go of our preconceived beliefs on what story structure “should” look like. Unlike Sarah, Karen possesses a dependency on words. “’Obsess’ comes from the Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere, from ob- (against or in front of) + sedere (to sit) = ‘sit opposite to’ (literal) = ‘to occupy, frequent, besiege’ (figurative),” she says (175). Words become something concrete for Karen to hold onto, something she can actually have control over. “I was obsessed with Sarah, meaning obsessed by her, deprived by her very existence of some quality I needed to feel complete and in charge of myself,” she continues (175). Karen’s use of definitions, her attachment and need to use words to concretely describe and somehow prove her feelings, becomes her justification for them, solidifying her feelings into facts.
But why this need for control? When the man who sexually assaulted her in high school is charged with new allegations, a former classmate tells her he’s “sure he slept with his students. I’m sure they slept with him. They knew what they were doing! We knew what we were doing...We were never children.” (162). To him, their sexual maturity dismisses any notion that they could be taken advantage of. Karen’s need for control stems from nobody believing her, or taking the time to acknowledge what might have happened. And because the other characters in the novel are so easy to dismiss her account, readers are forced into yet another trust exercise: to the narrator, her point of view is the truth, but whether or not it is actually true, that is left up to the reader to determine.
In the final section of the story, Choi switches POV once again, introducing Claire. And when a man forces himself on her, she wonders “how to confront Robert Lord and how to forget Robert Lord” (256). Claire simultaneously wants to forget what this man did to her, but also wants to ensure his power is taken away. And it isn’t until “the decision to rename the school the Robert Lord School for the Arts had been reversed due to ‘a credible allegation of sexual abuse from a former student’” that Claire feels a moment of peace (256). While Sarah could not find the words to speak up, and while Karen spoke up but was not believed, in this final section someone both speaks out and is believed.
Choi’s novel is timely in its reckoning with sexual assault, innovative in its formatting, and almost rule-breaking in its consistent switch of point of view and facts. But the entire novel is tied together by the overarching premise of trust. The current legal system puts strenuous weight on survivors to speak out, and then too often does not result in justice for the survivor. Choi calls on readers to question the truth, to take a plunge and trust the stories of survivors. Because until we do, too many will not have the words, too many will be fearful and dissuaded from speaking out. An unreliable narrator is determined by the audience. But what if we stopped treating victims of sexual abuse as unreliable? What if, instead, we placed that label onto those called out?
“My mother first exploited my memory, and then insulted it, but the conclusion I reached didn’t change. My memory was my innermost self and I had to protect it.”
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