TRUST EXERCISE by S Choi - Nat'l Bk Award '19

Susan Choi's novel "Trust Exercise" received the 2019 Nat'l Bk Award for fiction.  It's an excellent choice for its skillful & surprising story-telling and its prescient issues.  Choi proffers keen abilities to inhabit the lives of high school adolescents in a profound and unforeseen manner.  The novel is set in a school for the performing arts where students have an edge over other teens in sensing what they want to do in life. But, as with all adolescents, they possess intense emotions & strong capabilities meshed with impetuous behaviors lacking in sound judgement and life experiences.  Still, ardor of youth has fervor, lust and oftentimes misdirected aims to please & seek approval.  Sarah is the main character in the first half of the book; or first Act.  Choi's ingenious construct in a select performing arts high school examines the precociousness of ego & amplified pathos.  Many drama students come with their own heightened drama & desire to stand-out.  Sarah & David meet their first semester during a "trust exercise" for actors.  The students are prone & situated in a darkened space to intensify their tactile senses & feelings.  Mr. Kingsley, the drama teacher adds fuel to a combustible mixture of adolescent hormones & adult bodies.  The torrid sexual & emotional relationship between Sarah & David takes center stage.  Kingsley is a brutish, Svengali drama teacher adapt at coercing students through hurdles of self-flaggelation.  The 2nd half of the book; Act II, takes place a decade later and focuses on a minor character from Act I, Karen, a former "friend" of Sarah's.  The story is now told in flashback to traumatic events in Karen's life that were shrouded in secrecy.  The narrative style makes a mysterious twist and the reader is unsure of whose directing the storylines.  There's also an added play within the "play" of Act II.  "Trust Exercise," in its truest sense  is about power in relationships.  There are power shifts amongst peers and more odious, abusive power plays enacted between inappropriate adults and vulnerable adolescents.  This emotionally penetrating coming of age novel is keenly perceptive.  Choi captures the passions of youth combined with emerging sagaciousness garnered with age.  As an adult Karen contemplates, "Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self?"  She realizes "You're choosing for another when you make choices.  We overlap.  We get tangled.  You can't help but hurt."   Trust me.  Susan Choi's "Trust Exercise" is exceptional.  Although, "Thoughts are often false.  A feeling's always real.  Not true, just real."