Susan Choi's Trust Exercise Is Spring's Most-Talked-About Novel

How rage and the Access Hollywood tape inspired this spring’s most inventive and polarizing novel.

- Hillary Kelly

When the novelist Susan Choi arrives at the launch party for the new Center for Fiction in Fort Greene, a woman bearing a clipboard is waiting to take her name. Choi pulls off her soft gray beanie as the woman scans the list with a furrowed brow and scurries over to another staffer. “Hmmm,” says the gatekeeper. “Are you sure you’re on the list?” Choi explains that she’s a member of the work space and was personally invited. The woman looks around and shrugs. “You can go in, I guess.”

In the center’s vast, modish reading room, dozens of portraits of the greatest living writers—from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—loom over the partygoers. The real Salman Rushdie swoops past his own outsize image. Choi bumps into the photographer, who insists he once took her picture at a festival. I can’t find it on the walls.

Choi has been writing novels for 20 years, but Trust Exercise, her mind-bending latest, is her best shot at joining the pantheon of authors whose faces are mounted on library walls and recognized at the door. It is the sort of page-turning metafiction that readers love to argue about—a Gen-X bildungs roman that speaks to younger generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle box about the fallibility of memory. It’s also a paean to anger, arguably the defining emotion of our time, and after decades of tamping it down, Choi came by it honestly around the time Donald Trump got elected and she separated from her husband.

In her first four novels, Choi asked broad, deep questions about what it means to be an American. She personalized real-life dramas behind the news—Patty Hearst’s lost year (in the Pulitzer-nominated American Woman), the Unabomber’s letter-writing campaign (in Person of Interest