Trust Exercise – Susan Choi

When Trust Exercise first came out, it was one of those books that everyone was talking about – Barack Obama even put it on his books of the year list in 2019. But for all that talk, very few readers actually went into specifics as to what it’s about. That’s because Trust Exercise is a sickeningly intense novel that doesn’t so much ‘twist’ the plot as destablise everything the reader knows about how the story is playing out.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you’re into, you’re going to want to stop reading here. I’m about to spoil the shit out of Trust Exercise, in service of those readers who would rather know the score (or anyone who’s googled ‘Trust Exercise ending explained’ after reading it scratching their heads). The only non-spoilery heads up I’ll give is that there are basically no chapter breaks, forcing you to practically gorge Trust Exercise in a few sittings.

So, Trust Exercise is divided into three parts. The first is fairly straightforward and self-explanatory – in fact, it would probably stand alone as a novella. It’s the story of a first love that came to a painful end. The protagonists, Sarah and David, are students at an elite performing arts school. They fall in love and fail spectacularly at communicating their needs and feelings, as adolescents are wont to do. Their charismatic theatre teacher, Mr Kingsley, exploits their pain in the name of making them better performers.

A travelling troupe of actors come to visit the town and stage a controversial performance of Candide. They are led by two (much) older men, Liam and Martin – and somehow, Sarah ends up on a double date with them, and another girl from her class, Karen. Yes, it’s weird and creepy that these adults are on dates with literal teenagers, even more so when Sarah’s “date” with Liam culminates with a traumatic sexual encounter in a bedroom at a party at Mr Kingsley’s house. The first section of Trust Exercise ends with Sarah seeking comfort from Karen’s mother (who is not like a regular mom, she’s a Cool Mom).

Now, here’s where Trust Exercise levels up. There’s a strong shift in point-of-view in the second section, and then again in the third. Each shift reveals the unreliability of the story told in the previous section.

Part 2 takes us out of Sarah’s story, and into Karen’s – only, her name isn’t actually Karen. The first part of the story was a novel written by Sarah, a fictionalised account of their high school experiences, and Karen is extremely bitter about how she has been portrayed.

As adults, ‘Sarah’ is an author, ‘Karen’ is a souped-up administrative assistant/PA, ‘David’ is a stage director, and ‘Martin’ has recently been fired from his teaching job for inappropriate relationships with students. Martin has also recently written a play, which David agrees to stage, and Karen not only organises the whole thing but also wrangles herself the only female part and convinces Sarah to participate as a dresser backstage. It’s all part of her master plot for vengeance, as it would seem Martin groomed and then ditched her as a teenager, leaving her pregnant and traumatised. So, she shoots her shot – literally. Instead of loading the play’s prop gun with blanks, she puts a live round in the chamber and shoots Martin in the dick. Good for her, I guess?

Once again, it feels like Trust Exercise could end right there, but there’s another part to come. In the third and final section, a young woman named Claire is looking for her birth mother. That search brings her to the performing arts school that Sarah, Karen, et al attended. It would seem that Claire is the baby that Karen gave up for adoption.

Claire meets with Mr Lord, the drama teacher she believes taught her mother. If it’s taking you a second to connect the dots, this teacher appears to be the same one that Sarah described as Mr Kingsley back in part one (Lord, King-sley, geddit?). Mr Lord lures Claire into his house under the guise of answering her questions over dinner, plies her with wine, then forces himself on her. Reading between the lines, it would seem that there was no ‘Martin’, no ‘Mr Kinglsey’, and that Mr Lord was the perpetrator of all of these abuses and assaults. He so destroyed the young women in his care that they couldn’t tell their stories directly: they had to obfuscate his identity and disguise the truth to reveal what happened to them, even to the reader.

I mean, I think that’s what happened. Trust Exercise is an incredibly complex novel, and Choi is very withholding as an author. The reader has to fill in so many blanks, it’s near impossible to tell whether you’re reading it ‘right’. I read another review that suggested ‘Karen’ and ‘Sarah’ were actually the same person, with Karen’s rage and bitterness directed to a personified younger self, which never actually occurred to me as I was reading but could definitely track.

The only thing we can really know for certain is that Trust Exercise is a story about predatory older men and the younger women they exploit. Even though none of the victims can tell us a wholly objective or ‘true’ version of events, in harmony their stories paint a picture of a devastating cycle of abuse. I’m struggling to decide how I feel about this book, because it’s undoubtedly well done, but it’s also difficult to read and near impossible to recommend – even long after turning the last page, I feel unsettled and upset by it, which is undoubtedly the point.

Read Trust Exercise on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Trust Exercise:

• “The author claims that writing this book was like a dream. Reading it was like a nightmare.” – Bruce J. Berger
• “If you’re in the market for a depressing story about insufferable teens and pernicious adults at an arts high school in a horrible, crummy city, this is the book you’ve been looking for!” – Susan May
• “When I finished reading this I googled “what the hell was trust exercise even about”.” – R. Crabtree
• “This book was like talking to a person who never shuts up and can’t get to the point. You want to know what they’re talking about but they blab and blab so much that your head is spinning. Then the last part was like a completely normal person talking but I didn’t know what they were talking about.” – chica