Trust Exercise

I just finished Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, which I encountered in the used section of Epilogue Books (cleverly known as Prologue Books) last Saturday when I was between grabbing some sushi with mom and going to get a long-delayed professional haircut from Ashlyn, something that I should really do more often. Ashlyn was running a little behind when I got there, so I started in reading the book, which ended up being another excellent excuse to not keep banging my head against the brick that is Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals.

I had hesitated before buying it. Choi was a couple of years behind me at Yale and was someone I saw around and at parties, someone I knew tangentially but not really. When I'm reading books by people I went to college with -- be it Claire Messued whom I did know or Choi or Amor Towles whom I kinda almost knew -- there's always a vague hint of envy and the path not taken for me, I am envious of some glamorous writer's life I project onto them, of Yaddo and MacDowell and other verdant writerly retreats. I know in fact their lives are substantially grinds of giving readings and signing books to crowds of 20, 30, 50 people if they're lucky sometimes, that it's not all as fancy as it seems. But still I wonder.

But then again I've never really had much of a knack for fiction and certainly never began to hone the craft. 

In any case, it's a fine book. Unexpected twists and turns and all of that. I had initially thought it was an analog to Normal People and there's an element of truth to that, but much of that ends up being a sidebar if not an outright red herring to where the book ends up. In some ways, Choi gives us two plots (and a half?) for the price of one. I'll be back for more.