There is a puppetmaster pulling the strings in the performing arts school at the center of this novel — Mr Kingsley, the charismatic acting teacher who runs the Trust Exercise class, where the lights are turned off and the students are encouraged to crawl around, explore, and touch each other. The purpose of this exercise, it is suggested, is some kind of self-awareness.
“Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?” [Mr Kingsley] whispered, ventriloquizing their apprehension. “What does it have — what do I have? Four limbs that carry me forward, and back. Skin that can sense cold and hot. Rough and smooth. What is it. What am I. What are we.”
The first half of this excessively clever novel is largely about Sarah and David, two 14-year-olds in the class with an intense mutual attraction, and an intermittent relationship. One is rich, one poor, neither is enormously talented, neither can drive (a fact of great importance in sprawling Houston), and they have plentiful sex, as do all the other students in this novel. Yet they are still teenagers with the social understanding and misunderstanding of adolescents.
To David, love meant declaration. [..] To Sarah, love meant a shared secret.
Mr Kingsley is deeply involved in their personal lives, under the guise of teaching. Public ‘exercises’ are held, where students are encourage to vent about their feelings towards each other.
“Stand up for your feelings, Joelle!”, Mr Kingsley barks out.
“We were best friends and you act like you don’t even know me!” The strangled grief in her voice is far harder to bear than the words.
Pretty much every class involves tears from at least one student, which the teachers encourage in the pursuit of Art. Mr Kingsley has private meetings with students whose inappropriateness is only hinted at, but most definitely cross a line. Other teachers are rumoured to have sex with students as well. ‘Creepy’ is the only word for this environment.
The writing effectively encapsulates all the complications, imperfections and agonies of teenage life.
These long days, this life conducted almost wholly away from their parents, in a nearly unsupervised world of their peers, is the source of the ardor they feel for their school.
Into this hormonal cauldron comes an English troupe — two male adult teachers who stay with Mr Kingsley and his husband, four boys for whom David’s house becomes the headquarters, and four girls who settle largely at Karen Wurtzel’s (Karen, for some reason, is the only student whose last name is provided). The students pair up, parties happen, sex occurs. An impromptu party at Mr Kingsley’s house when he is absent involves much drinking, drugs, sex, and a possible rape, and a definite end to the visit.
The second half of the novel is abruptly different, and it takes the reader some time to understand that it is from a different point of view.
“Karen” stood outside the [..] bookstore, waiting for her old friend the author. […] Was it accepting too much, to say “Karen”? “Karen” is not “Karen’s” name, but “Karen” knew, when she read the name “Karen”, that it was she who was meant.
It goes on in this vein for a long paragraph, of which the above is only a short excerpt. And who is this author? Turns out it is the Sarah (“Sarah”?) who is the protagonist of the book so far. A novelistic change of perspective is not unusual (see ‘Fates and Furies‘, for example), but is difficult to pull off effectively, and here “Karen” is a distinctly less interesting voice than “Sarah”.
Sarah isn’t equally aware, despite the ample evidence of Sarah’s inability to grasp her, Karen’s, feelings. Synonyms for “ample” include “bounteous”, “copious”, and “plenteous”, but not, according to this particular thesaurus, “voluminous”, which in its entry lists synonyms including “big”, “huge”, “roomy”, “capacious”, and … “ample”.
A little of this goes a long way, and the endless dictionary digressions of Karen’s mental landscape are pretty tedious.
Parsing through the verbiage to get to the plot, it becomes clear that Karen’s history of their days in school are very, very different from Sarah’s, and also different from those in Sarah’s novel. The author, here, is making the reader question everything they thought they knew: the perpetrators and victims, the question of consent, empathy with the supposed protagonist, and the actual facts. It is cleverly done, but it also feels manipulative.
Choi writes at a remove from her characters: all of them are described with a sense of detachment. The plot, by the second section, is almost irrelevant, and the denouement when it comes is somewhat unbelievable. (but did it really happen?). There is a final section which is even more confusing.
This is the kind of book that literary critics love, and indeed it won the National Book Award. I, unfortunately, found myself not quite trusting the author.
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