National Book Award winner Choi talks ‘Trust’
Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” moves like magma. She tells a story that flows with fluidity over 250 pages, yet it is thematically viscous as the novelist contemplates relationships between time and information, truths and untruths, youth and adulthood.
Without giving away too much of the narrative frame, “Trust Exercise” opens with a group of teens at a performing-arts high school through their fraught interactions and anxious aspirations, but the reliability of names and occurrences grows increasingly questionable as the story unfolds. The book’s title refers to both a theaterclass mechanism applied by a teacher and also to Choi’s narrative relationship to readers.
Choi is quick to place distance between her own youth and the story in “Trust Exercise.” The story has no specific setting, but Choi did graduate from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts as a theater student in the ’80s, an experience she describes as “joyful,” despite a red-eyed tension that runs through the book.
Last week Choi won the National Book Award for fiction for “Trust Exercise,” which is her fifth novel. The honor was particularly rewarding because the novel was something of an accident as it developed parallel to another project that was giving the author fits. She talked about both the book and her time at HSPVA.
Q: I don’t want to delve too deep into the novel’s structure at the risk of spoiling things. But it was an interesting format. I was wondering if story came first or structure?
A: Oh, definitely, story preceded structure. I can’t even plot stories in advance, let alone think about structure. Usually, with storytelling it’s very organic. With this book, the structure started with some organic evolutions as I was moving through the composition. None of that was premeditated. It emerged out of the writing.
Q: So you didn’t go in knowing one character in particular would be a pivot point for the story’s direction?
A: That pivot or shift, it all came out of the writing. It all happened of its own accord. I had a luxury with this book because it wasn’t my primary project. I was working on something different. I was taking breaks from this other work that really had me pulling at my hair. When that work became too painful, I’d dip into this file called “Trust Exercise,” just for fun. It felt like an escape, and it didn’t carry the weight of expectation of this other thing. It really emerged in a lull. I could put it down for months. And one day, it was the light-bulb cliché image. That has never happened for me, but it did this time. This new voice all the way off on the edges that jumps in. I was taken with it. I feel a little shameful admitting it, but I didn’t pull out my hair at all. The opposite is true. I had a ball.
Q: Thematically, there is a lot about information and how it can be bent and manipulated, as well as gender roles, that carries an allegorical weight for today. But it doesn’t feel like you set out to specifically write an allegory even though this ’80s story feels of the moment today.
A: That’s great. I think that’s all a novelist can hope for is for something to feel timely. I know from my own work, I’ve never deliberately tried to make something timely. I’m too slow. And novel writing is a process that takes years. So there’s no point in trying to write about a current moment, whatever that is. I think if we’re lucky, the writing somehow deals with a current moment in ways as an author I can’t anticipate.
Q: I hope this doesn’t sound pejorative. But there were moments that reminded me of “Peanuts.” Where the adults felt so absent.
A: I like the comparison to “Peanuts.” I didn’t have that explicitly in mind. But I loved that way of presenting parents, off stage and incomprehensible, with the voice doing that “WAH-WAH WAH-WAH.” To use another cartoon character, it’s like Homer Simpson says: “It’s funny because it’s true.” Even when the parents were present, they’re largely outside the frame. They’re in another dimension.
Q: Houston is never mentioned — and I assume that’s because you wanted this setting to feel relatable outside of one specific space. That said, references to Whataburger, La Tapatia and hurricanes felt close to home.
A: Yeah, yeah. I wanted those details in there because I think they give this world a feeling. At the same time, there’s fiction in it for me in that I’m trying to toe a line between specificity and generality. You want things to be particular but to feel universal. That is a weird conundrum. It’s something I try to convey to my students. Try to be as specific as you can, and if you do it right you can still touch a large number of readers, weirdly enough. So details like Whataburger give it that specificity. But at the same time, I wanted it to be a city that could be one of many cities, just not one of the two coastal metropolises, those centers of culture as conceived. The most important aspect to me was that there wasn’t decent mass transit. That a young person without a car could be affected by that. I just came back from a book fair in Miami, and that’s still true there. If you’re a young person or a traveling author without a car, you’re captive to the people who can move you around. It also mattered to me that this unnamed city had to be a place where these young people who wanted to be famous would feel like they weren’t at the center of things. They had to want to get to a place where that happens.
Q: The “Cats” sweatshirts indicated that: the idea of New York and Broadway as something aspirational. It reminded me of the way Hard Rock Cafe shirts were regarded in the ’80s.
A: I had the same feeling about the
Hard Rock Cafe shirts. “Cats” is more specific to Broadway. But I remember traveling to London in college, and I needed to come back with a Hard
Rock Cafe T-shirt.
Q: The book conveys a heavy and difficult time for teens. And I know the school in the book isn’t based in a deep way on HSPVA, but was your time there formative?
A: It was joyful. Sure, adolescence is an experience both joyful and difficult. That’s almost the job of that life period. But PVA was such an important place for me. In every way which theater or an acting education can be difficult for a young person, it also has this reverse side of joy. I loved PVA and went straight into theater at my college. It’s where I felt comfortable.
Q: Back then they didn’t have a creative writing program. I suppose if you were 15 today, that might have called to you.
A: I just met some of the creative writing students when I was in Austin for the book fest, and they were wonderful. The truth is, if they’d had a creative writing program in the ’80s, I’d have been on that. But I’m really glad I ended up in theater. School is interesting in how it has changed. It’s a place to learn, still. But kids learn a lot now, no matter what they do. But in school, they still learn to be who they are in the world. And PVA was so important to me that way. I think about the fact that kids felt so secure coming out in the early ’80s, and that was not happening in other places. It was a culturally vibrant and diverse place. It was comfortable for peers of mine who were different from what was considered the quote-unquote norm. That’s something precious about that school.