Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on April 9, 2019

There was a movie-based television show called Fame in the 1980s about students who attended a performing arts high school. The first half of Trust Exercise reads like a novelization of Fame, except that the characters have more sex. The best scenes are about the tensions and insecurities of performance. The most dismal scenes (and there are too many of them for my taste) reflect the melodrama of sexually charged teenage life. Fame was mildly entertaining because of the students’ performances, as opposed to their melodrama. Since a novel must describe (for example) a singing performance rather than allowing a reader to hear the song, I was underwhelmed by the novel’s first half. But then the novel became something different, an adult story of substance.

Sarah is 14 in 1982, attending a theatre arts school in the South, where she is mentored by Mr. Kingsley until he seems to lose interest in her. She gets it on with a boy named David and subjects her other friends to teen drama because that’s what teenage girls do. Other characters have drama that is peripheral to Sarah’s, including some visiting British students who stage a production of Candide that strikes the community as scandalous. Sometimes Sarah makes the lives of other students worse because, well, she’s a teenager.

By the end of the novel’s first half, Sarah is 16 and filled with turmoil. The second half twists the story in a way that gives the title a new meaning — as in, reading is an exercise of trust in the author that might be misplaced. The second half jumps forward 14 years and focuses a character who is called “Karen” in quotation marks because (she tells us) women named Karen are bland and nondescript. Karen Wurtzel is a seemingly minor character in the novel’s first half who is notable for having a relationship with an adult British teacher named Martin who accompanied the British acting students.

We learn in the second half that Karen abandoned acting and singing after graduating high school, studied modern dance in college, and became an accountant, a bland career for a bland person. Having returned to the town where she went to high school, Karen is again in contact with David. She eventually renews her acquaintance with Sarah when she gets Sarah’s autograph on a book that Sarah has written.

Karen’s references to her own name in quotation marks and to “the person we’re calling Mr. Kingsley” give the reader a clue that something is amiss in the telling of the novel’s first half. Karen seems to be fascinated by words and their potential or unintended meanings, which is fascinating for readers who love words. Words have the potential to mislead and the reader begins to suspect that a good many words in the novel have been misleading in some way. As the novel’s second half dissects the first half, the true nature of the first half becomes clear. A final, relatively short section focuses on a new character who adds an unexpected twist to the story.

A central theme in Trust Exercise is that acting requires true emotions to be felt in false circumstances — but how do we know that an emotion is true? The novel is clever in its construction and perceptive in its characterizations, while reminding us that characters are, in fact, just characters. They are what the author wants us to see, just as real people portray themselves as they want others to see them. The novel demonstrates, in fact, how people — not just actors — play a part, and how difficult it is for individuals to set aside their masks and be real. That’s more insight than you’ll get from watching the entire five-year run of Fame, although a reader will need to make it through the first half to reach the good stuff.

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Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 2, 2019

Women Talking is set in the imaginary Molotschna Colony in Bolivia, but the story is based on the real Manitoba Colony, where Mennonite women were drugged and raped over a period of years, their stories of waking up in pain dismissed as female fantasies or believed to be the work of demons who punished the women for their sins. The actual demons were several men in the colony, some of whom were related to the women they raped.

The novel posits that three hundred women were sprayed with an anesthetic used on farm animals and raped by eight men. A woman named Salome tried to kill them with a scythe, prompting the elders to have the men arrested for their own safety. Their families posted bail and they will now be returned, but what will the women do when they come back?

When the crimes were discovered, the perpetrators are jailed for their own safety, lest the women hack them to pieces with a scythe. As the men in the colony set about raising bail money for eight rapists, the women hold a meeting. The (male) elders have given the women the option of forgiving the men, thus assuring their place in Heaven, or leaving the colony and entering a world about which they know nothing, a prospect made more difficult by their illiteracy and unfamiliarity with any language except that spoken exclusively by Mennonites.

The women make their choice during a two-day discussion. The minutes are taken by August Epps, who gained an education after his family was excommunicated. Epps later returned and is seen by some as having his uses, although his lack of farming skills renders him useless in the eyes of most colonists.

The novel imagines how the women would discuss their difficult choice. They consider whether forgiveness is possible and whether there might be some sins so weighty that only God, and certainly not the victims, can be expected to forgive them. The women are expected to be obedient to their husbands, but since they have not been taught to read the Bible, they are no longer certain that obedience is actually something their faith commands. Perhaps the religion emphasizes love rather than obedience; they can’t be sure.

Most of the women have rejected the forgiveness option, and are now deciding whether they should leave or stay to fight their oppressors. But fighting — if the fight involves physical violence — would require them to violate the pacifist beliefs that are central to their religion. Still, a fight for gender equality need not be violent; the revolution could be bloodless.

If the women decide to leave, what impact will that decision have on the colony’s men, who might not all be inherently evil despite the “pernicious ideology that has been allowed to take hold of their hearts and minds.” Some suggest that they take the younger boys with them and teach them not to be rapists.

The story generates drama and suspense as, on the second day, the reader wonders whether the women will actually abandon the colony and their older children and go forward into a world they are ill-equipped to understand. There is also tension in Epps’ personal story. Perhaps listening to brave women discuss their futures will have an impact on Epps’ fate.

These are heavy discussions but Miriam Toews lightens the mood with digressions and gossip and personality clashes. Women Talking is smart, sad, funny, completely engaging, and remarkably original.

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American Heroin by Melissa Scrivner Love

Published by Crown on February 19, 2019

American Heroin is a sequel to Lola. You might want to read Lola because it’s a good book, and you should definitely read it before American Heroin to give context to some offhand comments that Lola Vazquez makes about her eventful past.

Lola is something of a criminal feminist, fighting to hold power as a gang leader in a profession that is dominated by men. To do that, she must be as tough and merciless as male gang leaders. Yet she brings a certain sensitivity to her work, an affinity for abused women and children, a conscience that does not let her live easily with the consequences of her violence.

Lola lives in Huntington Park in Los Angeles County, where she controls the heroin trade on certain street corners in partnership with a Machiavellian prosecutor named Andrea. Their partnership is uneasy, and Lola is not quite sure whether Andrea ever acts in anyone’s interest but her own. Lola, at least, takes care of her gang and her neighborhood, which she rules over like a benevolent but ruthless queen.

In the novel’s early stages, Lola is tricked into ordering the killing of man she doesn’t know. She also learns that a new cartel is taking the place of the one she helped bring down in Lola. Those two events turn out to be related in a way that puts Lola’s career and life at risk. What Lola does not immediately realize is that she has started a war that will also put her younger brother’s life at risk.

American Heroin introduces Louisa Mae, another victim of a violent childhood, a girl who learned in desperation to resort to violence herself. A cartel wants her dead because she is her father’s daughter. Louisa Mae’s story is interspersed with Lola’s. The reader eventually learns how those lives are connected. The connection is surprising.

Lola inhabits a world where, unlike white middle-class neighbors not far from hers, a child might catch a stray bullet at any moment. Lola’s adopted (sort of) daughter Lucy accepts the normalcy of that life, but Lola is adjusting to parental fears. The story’s best dramatic moments come not from Lola’s role as a gang leader, but from her insecurities as a mother. Multiple family dramas unfold as American Heroin steams to its conclusion.

Lola is a victim of her circumstances but she has learned to control those circumstances to the extent that control is possible. As Lola ponders the possibility of making a different kind of life, one in a safe neighborhood that isn’t associated with crime and violence, she wonders whether she would have a chance of being accepted in a white, upper-middle-class world, and whether she would want to be. A trip to Texas highlights the subtle racism that Latinas encounter in white-dominated environments.

Lola has more substance than a typical action hero, but when the time comes to fight, Lola can bring it. Like the last novel, this one includes a kick-in-the-gut moment that proves Lola’s ability to make tough decisions, substituting the ethics of a gang leader for the heart of a family leader. That Lola is a balance of good and evil may put off readers who always want to cheer for a protagonist, but I always prefer novels that recognize the war that so often rages in even the kindest hearts.

My most significant gripe about this series is that much of Lola’s substance is revealed through redundant monologues about what Lola is thinking or remembering. There are only so many times that Melissa Scrivner Love needs to tell the same story about Lola’s past or to share Lola’s present anxieties and doubts. There were times when I wanted to say “move on, we know this” except saying it would have been futile since Love wasn’t here to listen to my complaint. I also tend to be annoyed with novels that are written in the present tense (“Lola sets out to find Andrea”), but that might just be a personal quirk that won’t bother other readers.

As a thoughtful but fast-moving thriller with an unusual protagonist, American Heroin stands out from conventional crime novels. Lola might be an anti-hero, but she’s a hero to those who depend on her, just as Don Corleone was valued by those to whom he granted favors — until he came to collect a favor in return. I have enjoyed the character development in the two Lola books and I hope there are more on the horizon.

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Lessons from Lucy by Dave Barry

Published by Simon & Schuster on April 2, 2019

Dogs are effortlessly happy. Joy is a default state. Humans too often ignore daily or even hourly opportunities to be happy, if only for a few moments. Humans should be more like dogs. And there you have one of the lessons Dave Barry offers, but with a lot more humor, in Lessons from Lucy.

Barry is 70; Lucy is 10; both are entering their senior years. Barry wrote the book, he says, to try to identify how his dog Lucy manages to be so happy and whether he can apply those techniques to his own life.

Barry meanders a bit, as is his style, before he gets around to imparting each lesson, some of which are only tangentially related to dogs, not that it matters. The funniest chapter (to me) explains why aging sucks, and the funniest line is that AARP is the last sound people make before they die. Barry also pokes fun at mindfulness, motivational events, scallops, the folly of outsourcing customer service to distant countries, people who don’t think about what they might want to order until they reach the front of a fast food line, and many other targets. For a bit of time in each of the seven chapters, he talks about Lucy, who sounds like a wonderful dog, much like all other dogs except possibly the little ones who need to be carried all the time (one of the many prejudices I have in common with Barry, whose books I like because he seems to be a lot like me, only funnier).

Lucy’s lessons are things like Make Friends Easily, Never Stop Having Fun, Be a Good Companion to the People You Love, Let Go of Your Anger, and You Do Not Need More Stuff to Be Happy. All of those lessons (and more) are illustrated with amusing examples of the ways in which Barry could make his life better, as well as amusing examples of how Lucy lives those lessons effortlessly. So this is sort of a self-help book (although Barry makes fun of self-help authors in an epilog), but it is really a light examination of how someone who is getting older might not be too old to think about how to live a better life. And who can teach better lessons about living a good life than an aging dog?

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American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

Published by Random House on February 12, 2019

American Spy is a mixture of domestic drama and spy thriller. Much of its focus is on the difficult childhood and questionable parenting that shaped its protagonist, Marie Mitchell, and on Marie’s problematic relationship with her mother. Surrounding those domestic problems is a plot that follows Marie’s short career with the FBI and as a contractor working against the interests of a politician in Burkina Faso.

The novel begins in Connecticut in 1992. An attempt to kill Marie in her sleep doesn’t end well for the assassin. Two days later, using fake passports, she moves her two sons to Martinique, where her mother was born and is currently living.

After a day, Marie begins writing a journal so that her children, who believe their father died in a war, will one day understand the truth about her mother’s life. Most of the story consists of that journal. Do mothers who write extended explanations to their children include dialog and atmosphere? Maybe literature professors do, but not FBI agents who have been trained to stick to the facts and produce the dullest prose imaginable. I didn’t buy the journal concept, although most of the time it is easy to ignore the fact that the story is not told in a conventional narrative.

Marie’s story starts in New York, when in 1987 she is asked to leave the FBI so that she can work as a temporary contractor for the CIA. But Marie’s backstory dates to her childhood in Queens, where her father was a cop. Her interest in espionage may have been born when her 13-year-old sister confidently announced her intent to become a spy, showing no concern that her race might be a barrier to joining the intelligence community. Helene was always the braver, less timid sister, and it was Helene who encouraged Marie to follow in her footsteps. Some of the novel’s backstory follows Marie’s aborted relationship with Helene during their adulthood, as well as Helene’s romantic relationship with Daniel Slater. That relationship leads to revelations that become a turning point later in the story.

By 1987, the FBI had proven itself to be more lawless than the organizations upon which it spied, including its role in the murder of Fred Hampton while he slept. Marie has little love for her employer and is pleased to be asked to help gather intelligence about Burkina Faso while its president, Thomas Sankara, is in New York. The long-term goal is to influence the country’s elections with a political party America controls — the CIA’s version of “true democracy.” Marie has little interest in American expansionism, and even less in sleeping with Sankara in exchange for an obscene amount of money, but in the belief that she can outwit both her handler and Sankara, she accepts the assignment in order to pursue an agenda of her own.

The main plot follows Marie’s relationship with Sankara as she tries to sort through how she feels about his charismatic condemnation of imperialism and his flirtation with authoritarianism, how she feels about the CIA’s attempt to use her, and how she feels about the revelations mentioned above. The pace is deliberate but the story is so rich in detail that it never becomes dull. The plot holds a nice surprise although not the sort of surprise that has become conventional in spy novels.

The decision to emphasize domestic drama might put off some spy novel fans but it might also appeal to domestic drama fans who typically avoid spy novels. I wouldn’t herald Lauren Wilkinson as the second coming of John le Carré, as have some people who blurbed the book, but Wilkinson’s fresh take on spy novels has some appeal. I appreciated its focus on a country that is rarely in the news and on the way in which private companies meddle in foreign affairs with America's under-the-table blessing, not to promote democracy but to increase private wealth. Apart from the novel’s other merits, I also appreciated Wilkinson’s graceful prose.

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