Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Fiction, 2019

The outfit was Doc Martens boots and shredded black fishnets and bleached cutoff jeans and a white, black, and red T-shirt with a spiky-haired guy sneering “Oi!” Her hair was short and she’d drawn thick lines around her eyes. Inside the lines her eyes didn’t look larger, as she’d probably hoped, but sunk in from the rest of her face, like she’d put on a mask. From under her eyeliner mask she saw me, the person she’d most hoped to avoid, just as she was the person I’d most hoped to avoid, so that, thinking and acting the same way, our efforts canceled each other. And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

Susan Choi passes the first and arguably most important test of writing about the fraught land of teenagers’ social dynamics: It’s tense and unsettling to read about these students at a performing arts school navigating their interpersonal connections to one another. There’s a dynamic quality to Choi’s writing that makes the scorching humor leave a deeper mark than it might otherwise. Especially across the first half of the book, there are emotional landmines everywhere.

Then Choi pivots the novel in a way that I’d rather not articulate but that puts it in conversation with other recent notable instances of meta deconstruction that interrogates the longstanding convention of the unreliable narrator. Although it’s a striking choice, I’m not sure it entirely works, in part because Choi deliberately keeps muddying the distinctions between the first and second half of her story. There’s a lot of technique to Trust Exercise. It could have used a little less.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

Fiction, 2023

It’s a short, bumpy bus ride to the recreational yard, where there is a herb and vegetable garden walled with wire. He’s gotten into gardening over the years, and this is how he spends his outdoor hours. No shovels or pointed tools, I am assured by the attendant who had me sign the waiver. Obviously, he adds with a chummy laugh, and I want to tell him it’s not actually obvious. You would be amazed at how easy this country makes it to hurt someone if that is your goal.

Inspired by real events, Bright Young Women is effective because its specificity is a conduit to more universal points about the multitude of ways that society doles out indignities and abuse to those who identify with the gender of its title. Knoll structures the plot so that it basically has two protagonists navigating two different eras, albeit ones in close proximity to each other. These two characters are linked and yet vividly distinctive. The different timelines of the novel are united and yet pleasingly feel like two different books shuffled together.

Knoll’s greatest skill is in pacing. There’s strong forward momentum here, each brisk, purposeful chapter ending with the sort of teasing hook that compels the turning of at least a few more pages. At her best, she’s on par with Gillian Flynn and Stephen King, two of the true masters of that valuable authorial trick. Bright Young Women flies.