attempting a crossword puzzle of a book
and failing to finish it, as always
Fiction, 2019
My friends and I have an ongoing joke about the idea of narratives. It started a year ago when my friend had come over to my dorm room, and we found ourselves two hours deep into a conversation about how we only glean meaning from events—and most bizarrely, from ourselves—if we slot them into a narrative. Things need to be placed into the context of a story for them to make sense. The trouble comes when narratives collide, and our careful construction of events is at complete odds with that of a vocal other. Did we delude ourselves? Did we lie? Did they lie? Did the event turn out to be nothing larger than a passing moment, a space of deep insignificance that has been shrined in memory? What is real? I can’t say that Trust Exercise answers these questions, but it does flesh them out.
In an ordinary suburban American town, people dream of making it big at a performing arts high school. We meet Sarah and David, who come from different backgrounds (even when this isn’t a point of contention, it is), fall in love, and then break up. As the reader, we’re teetering the careful line between being a child-teenager and an adult-teenager (at 21, I comfortably feel I am the latter). It is an age when nothing is reliable—especially our own accounts. Their daily lives are as expected; angsty, confusing, and intense, bookmarked constantly by their theatre practices where they explore their own plasticity, and to their horror, see the same reflected in their peers. But if this sounds like too much of a return-to-high-school experience for you, I would urge you to hold on. The second half of the novel changes everything; the characters are older and now reflect on their time together and attempt to piece together what was “real” and what was a “lie”.
I feel like I’ve already said too much, and this newsletter is never really about detailing the story anyway, so I will leave you with two additional observations: 1) Choi has some of the most delicious writing I’ve read. I inhale her sentences with the same vigour as my morning coffee. 2) This is a novel where the word “plot” holds dual significance—in that it absolutely has a plot, and it’s stunning, but also in the sense that the author has literally been plotting against us this entire time. By the end, we are all revealed to be the biggest fools, and that is a feeling I enjoy.
Song - Buddy’s Rendezvous
Film - Gone Girl