Trust exercise, by Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s National Book Award winning novel (2019) illustrates what the phrase “unreliable narrator” might have been coined for. In fact, most novels are “trust exercises” in that we do tend to trust what the author reveals to us. There are three parts to the book. In the first, main characters Sarah and David are sophomores at a prestigious high school for the arts in an unnamed southern city. They fall in love, both with each other and, to some extent, with their charismatic theater (theatre!) teacher, Mr. Kingsley. But things fall apart, particularly after the arrival of a group of English theater students and their two adult teachers, Martin and Liam, who arrive to put on what turns out to be a shocking adaptation of Candide. In the second section, set 14 years later, Sarah’s former “best friend,” Karen, is attending an author event where Sarah, no longer in theater but a successful author, will be reading from her novel which is based on their years at the high school. However, Karen’s story of the events that took place there differs significantly from Sarah’s retelling, and in major ways. David also resurfaces, as a director known for putting on uncomfortable plays in uncomfortable venues, as does Martin, the older of the two Englishmen who is now in disgrace for reputedly preying on his students. But who preyed upon whom and what really happened? The end of Karen’s section is shocking, but no more so that the third short section, set a quarter of a century later from the main events, which will introduce an entirely different narrative and narrator. Frankly, I’m still puzzling out the “truth” of the novel. Choi has a great gift for evoking the fraught lives of artsy high school students striving to star in their own lives. Recommended. 257 pp.