Choi’s mastery earns ‘Trust,’ elevates teen story

Teenagers are dramatic creatures. They can weep and rage like it’s a job, spin in and out of friendships and relationships for reasons the CIA couldn’t crack. Plenty of cliched stories have sprung out of that strange, sulky randomness.

But in her masterful, twisty fifth novel, “Trust Exercise” (Henry Holt and Co., 272 pp., ★★★g), Susan Choi upgrades the familiar coming-of-age story with remarkable command and sensitivity.

The story centers – at least at first – on the Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts, where theater students endure pressure-cooker classes led by a teacher who’s almost sadistically determined to yank 15-year-old souls into adulthood. “I won’t rest until you cry,” he tells one student, David.

And for David’s off-and-on girlfriend, Sarah, the tears come easily. “Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older,” another teacher reassures her, which is no reassurance at all.

Choi elevates this stuff above high-school-confidential fare partly through the sheer richness of her prose: Choi’s talent is for taking ineffable emotions and giving them an oaken solidity. When a nervous student hits the stage, “his eyes are cast up, anxiously, as if he’s aware he is barely retaining the fickle attention of God.” When Sarah despairs of her feelings for David, she sneaks into his car for solace: “The hushed night disappeared from view and she saw only the interior skin of this filthy armor of the boy she loved.”

Over the course of the school year Choi describes, Sarah and David grow up a lot, but not quite enough. To be a teen is to be constantly unsettled, and a group of British students arrive to do the unsettling, becoming an invasive species for the tenuous friendships and affairs within the academy. How invasive? The answer to that comes via Choi’s writerly sleight of hand: The novel’s first part, we learn, is a suspect fictional version written by an adult Sarah.

Karen, the author of the novel’s second part, has a few things to say about the literary inclinations of her friend, many of them bitter.

(Scribble scribble scribble went Sad Sarah in her Solemn Notebook,” she recalls her former classmate.)

So Karen’s and Sarah’s versions of events sometimes braid, sometimes tangle around each other.

And what soon becomes clear is that all their teenage drama has blinkered them to others’ more substantial dramas.

When a teacher from that British cohort returns to stage a new play, the performance becomes a stand-in for the abuses and embarrassments that are hard to shake even decades later.

“You wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth,” Karen tells Sarah at a pivotal moment. “Why even do that? Who do you think you’re protecting?”

Choi, in this witty and resonant novel, thinks of the teenage years as an earthquake – a rupture that damages our internal foundations and can require years to repair.