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Susan Choi’s ’Trust Exercise’: Letter-perfect satire of the highs and humiliations of adolescence

The magnetic teacher. The awe-struck students. The ravages of adolescent desire. This potent mix is deftly orchestrated by an author who will always surprise you.

Susan Choi, author of "Trust Exercise."
Susan Choi, author of "Trust Exercise."Read moreLeft: Susanchoi.com

Trust Exercise

By Susan Choi

Henry Holt. 272 pp. $27

Reviewed by Ron Charles

There’s one in every high school: a charismatic teacher who cultivates a clique of acolytes. Miss Jean Brodie aside, this teacher is typically a man in his prime, parceling out the precious gift of his intimacy to a select group. Amid rumors of some past glory, he radiated an air of long-suffering superiority, as though his willingness to teach mere high school students were another example of his largesse. He was a vampire thirsty for the fervor of teenage boys and girls.

That immortal figure rises up at the center of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, the latest of her startling novels about academic life. Mr. Kingsley is a theater teacher at Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts, an elite institution "intended to cream off the most talented" students and prepare them for "their exceptional lives." Mr. Kingsley is exotic by the standards of this unnamed Southern town in the early 1980s. He once lived in New York! He refers to Broadway star Joel Grey as Joel! He owns a "bizarre human-size doll that was supposed to be called a ‘soft sculpture.’ ”

To the theater students desperate for his attention, "Mr. Kingsley was impossibly witty and sometimes impossibly cutting; the prospect of talking with him was terrifying and galvanizing; one longed to live up to his brilliance and equally feared that it couldn’t be done."

This is the most precise skewering of a magnetic teacher since Muriel Spark’s 1961 classic. Choi’s voice blends an adolescent’s awe with an adult’s irony. It’s a letter-perfect satire of the special strain of egotism and obsession that can fester in academic settings. Choi is particularly attentive to Mr. Kingsley’s inane maxims, which his adoring students polish into sacred incantations. This reminds me so clearly of my own slavish scribblings during senior year that I can’t help laughing and cringing, as though Choi were spying on me in high school.

She’s a master of emotional pacing: the sudden revelation, the unexpected attack. She’s equally astute at portraying the exaggerated passions of teenage life and the way that youthful energy warps the fabric of reality. "Remember the impossible eventfulness of time," Choi tells us, "transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon."

At the center of this story is 15-year-old Sarah, one of those sophisticated young women trapped in "the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults." She’s swept up in a steamy relationship with another sophomore, an insatiable young man named David whose sexual prowess sets the school ablaze with gossip.

"They were as noticeable as lighthouses," Choi writes. "Even when they both stared straight ahead, the wire ran between them, and their peers changed their paths to avoid tripping on it."

How cunningly this novel considers the way teenage sexuality is experienced, manipulated, and remembered. And no one writes about erotic misadventures with more vicious humor than Choi.

When Mr. Kingsley gets wind of Sarah and David’s tumultuous relationship, he sweeps in with a series of classroom activities — “trust exercises" — supposedly designed to elicit authentic emotions. But the enterprise feels both exploitative and humiliating, a kind of emotional pornography designed for his benefit. At the end of class when Mr. Kingsley says, “Sarah, come by and see me tomorrow at lunch,” her peers know she’s not in trouble. “Sarah has become the kind of Problem they would all like to be,” Choi writes. “How proud she feels, to command his attention.”

Don’t fancy you know where this is going; Choi will outsmart you at every step. Halfway through the novel, she suddenly recasts the entire story — several years in the future and from a different point of view. It’s a vertiginous maneuver that remains unsettling as Choi’s new narrator shifts erratically between first and third person, trying to unpack what’s “sealed in the amber of a childhood crush.” Who gave consent and who can give consent become questions complicated by a conspiracy of shame and shamelessness, the competing desires of young frenemies and unscrupulous adults. The result is a dramatic exploration of the distorting forces of memory, envy, and art.

And Choi’s brief final section, which "ends this strange eventful history," will confound you yet again. Committing time and attention to a novel is always a trust exercise. This author never takes you where you thought you were going, but have faith: You won’t be disappointed.

Ron Charles reviews books for the Washington Post.

Susan Choi appears at 7:30 p.m., May 2, at the Central Library, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Free. Information: 215-567-4341, freelibrary.com