Trust Exercise
When I interviewed my niece for my homesick project, I asked her what homesickness feels like. Among other things, I loved that she very specifically said, “I feel it in my sternum.” Because there’s a real physicality to emotion, right? See: pit in stomach, butterflies in chest, etc.
Susan Choi’s National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise reads, to me, like an exploration of emotion. But unlike some plot-free autofiction, where navel-gazey emotion is the point and where the reader might roll her eyes at the ambiguity of it all (who, me?), this novel could be described as plot-forward metafiction. It could even be described as two separate fast-paced novels. (It’s so cleverly structured!) The setting is a performing arts high school, where students are — not surprisingly — very attuned to their feelings, as is one legendary acting teacher who knows how to manipulate his students’ emotions to calibrate a performance. So when I say “an exploration of emotion,” I mean that Choi quietly tucks in lines like “…[took her] breath away through a painful compression of her rib cage and lungs” or “It had been a sudden pressure on the sternum, a pressure that meant excitement, and dread, and anticipation, and reluctance…”
Choi nails it with the details and nuances surrounding the drama of first loves, parent-child angst, and the topic of consent, but a close read shows that she’s also playing with the spectrum of “certainty”:
“They know so much about each other, yet so little.”
“They seem both familiar and foreign, as if they have always been here and as if they have just now arrived.”
Choi’s focus on specific ages and what one can/can’t do at that age (drink, drive, legally consent to sex) initially comes off as banal, non-essential — barely noticeable, even. But it’s constant. Is the point that one day you’re X and then magically the next day you’re Y? Is that even possible? Does someone — or someone’s perception of themselves or others — flip just like that?
Emotion can make us do funny things. And let’s not doubt for a second that it affects perception.
(Wow, what an amazing mind-bender of a book.)
originally published on instagram