How rage and theAccess Hollywoodtape inspired this springs most inventive and polarizing novel.
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Hmmm, says the gatekeeper.
Are you sure youre on the list?
Choi explains that shes a member of the workspace and was personally invited.
But did you buy a ticket?
you could go in I guess.
The real Salman Rushdie swoops past his portrait.
Choi bumps into the photographer, who insists he once took her picture at a festival.
I cant find it on the walls.
Im conscious of having been so mad during so much of the writing of this book, she says.
Im not entirely sureif I should believe everything Susan Choi says.
In person, she is expressive and very friendly.
I wanted to read it all the time.
Jennifer Egan, the Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist, first came to Chois work whilereviewingAmerican Woman.
The two are now friends and neighbors in Fort Greene.
Shes really an original, Egan says.
Shes following an internal rudder to territory thats always fascinating.
By the timeAmerican Womanwas getting critical accolades, she says it was underperforming already.
But unlike the first four novels,Trust Exerciseis self-aware.
Its a perfectly stitched together Frankensteins monster of narrative introspection and ambiguity.
Before writing it, I got sick of myself, Choi explains.
So in her latest novel, I wasnt laboring over making the sentences pretty.
This time, Chois sentences dont curlicue; they end in pointed spikes.
Like Muriel Spark, whom Choi read while conceiving ofTrust Exercise, it has a lean self-effacing tartness.
Instead, its the plot that contorts.
One novelist told me that everyone she knows either adores it or loathes it.
Over all these events, Mr. Kingsley presides as puppet master.
Martin pursues Sarahs classmate Karen and Liam chats up Sarah.
A party at Mr. Kingsleys house becomes anIce Stormfor the children of Rick Moodys generation.
He squashes her on the bed.
Sarah is disgusted by his dead white hairy limbs and unaccountably wrinkly erection.
She yells out Noooo, noooo, noooobut then orgasms.
Its a sticky scene, heaving with sweat and indignity, landing perhaps at the edge of rape.
But all that came before Harvey Weinstein and Trump.
I wantedTrust Exerciseto somehow be about how radically differently were seeing this stuff, says Choi.
But then again, how many of usareseeing it differently, and is it making a difference?
Sexy jargon that no one understood.
It was late in the era of Lacan and poststructuralism.
She applied to work atThe New Yorkeras the assistant to the fiction editor but ended up in fact-checking.
Ill be a real writer.
She waits a beat.
She tucked; and it fell out … She tucked; it fell out.
Karen is watching and constructing Sarah as a performer.
At the same time, Karens story the next 102 pages ofTrust Exercise is also a performance.
Sarah (or is it Sarah?)
She remembers thatSarah turned to writing as consolation for being ostracized in high school.
That is, fiction.
It could all be so hokey in the wrong hands, like a high-school creative-writing assignment.
It cheapens it to imply its a game, says Nunez.
This is a very serious book about a human experience and what goes on inside peoples heads and hearts.
Karen accuses Sarah of taking liberties creating composites, sidelining people, and perhaps dangerously romanticizing Mr. Kingsley.
But Karen, too, is manipulating her own story.
Shes self-reflective beyond believability, and she often punctures her own authority.
Mr. Kingsley, she implies, hypnotized his students in far more nefarious ways than Sarah lets on.
I had a great time with that.
As the fall of 2016 and the election crept closer, I was really irate and unruly with myself.
I was feeling very much as if Id wound up traveling down this road I hadnt meant to travel.
At the same time, Chois marriage of 13 years, toTimesrestaurant critic Pete Wells, came undone.
Along came Karen, in a moment Choi remembers vividly.
Choi was about to eat lunch with a friend whod brought Russ & Daughters to her workspace.
Shes mad, Choi thought, and I heard her voice … Choi also reexamined her own memories.
I remember beginning to feel the interest of grotesquely, inappropriately older men, she says.
The DJ flirted with her over the phone.
I felt sophisticated and recognized as a smart, interesting girl, and somehow I gave him my address.
I never met him.
She had an older boyfriend in high school, too.
(Dont tell my mother, she says, laughing.)
In grad school, it was barely surprising that there were affairs being conducted between professors and graduate students.
It was gossip, not scandal.
But asTrust Exercisecame together, Choi began to reevaluate her earlier use of sexual trauma as fictional backstory.
But withTrust Exercise, she began asking herself, Why does it feel so inevitable?
Why is that such a familiar story?
Although sexual abuse is the through-line ofTrust Exercise, the novel doesnt hand down a verdict.
Thats what makes it so riveting.
I didnt think it was done.
She had to write three more endings until she found the right one.
But the Weinstein revelations didnt encourage her to reconstruct it as a social-justice fantasy.
The Kavanaugh hearings crystallized everything that Id ever thought about regardingTrust Exercise, in a nutshell, she says.
In this light, the title of her novel has a double meaning.
Its an acrobatic working out of the ultimate #MeToo question: Whom can we trust?
Can we even trust ourselves?
The more time I spentwith Susan Choi, the more I wondered who exactly she was.
Ultimately, Choi says, she is simply not an interesting person.
While Karen does her best to glamorize her life as a professional organizer, Choi does the opposite.
She seems wistful, though not disappointed by any of this.
But on the subject of career expectations, she suddenly opens up.
Recognition is relative, after all.
People still find that really shocking.
The Pulitzer nomination did nothing to alter that self-perception.
If she can imagine that kind of success for Sarah, why not for herself?
I think that shes enormously respected, shes won important awards, shes gotten stellar reviews.
But it isnt just a question of sales.
She deserves a much larger readership.Trust Exerciseis picking up steam.
She wrote neat, lyrical novels that purported to tell a Truth.
The sexual lives of her earlier protagonists unfolded like a passed note.
But Choi is now Karen, born of her own fury.
Stories like Lewinskys are what made the sexual-power dynamics inTrust Exerciseso interesting to her.
Thats why I related to Karen, she says.
It should be said that Karen, the underdog Choi so relished writing, does eventually surprise everyone.
Choi would argue that she is neither of her protagonists.
But perhaps shed appreciate that shes also no longer just herself.
Shes now a subject, a character, an idea of a novelist.
Its a bright-pink galley ofTrust Exercise.
Wait, she says with a half-stunned grin, did everyone get this?
She looks at me with disbelief.
Theyre giving everyone my book?
Trust Exercisewill be published on April 9.
