Susan Choi

4.5, rounding up.
First off, ignore the blurb beyond “high school for the performing arts.”
Second, imagine if the structure of ASYMMETRY was as audacious as it seemed on first glance.
Third, were you a theater kid? Were you a kid who had a passionate yet completely mystifying love as a teenager - maybe more than one? Complete with misadventures and misunderstandings, both internally and relating to one another?

This book was complex, at times nearing but never edging into confusing, and show more goddamn it sliced me right open. The traumas we inflict on each other as teenagers never totally go away - not to mention the ones inflicted on us by those who are ‘grown up’ already. This devious little book is going to stick with me like the face of my high school best friend: unforgettable, even when all the details fade. show less

Totally overrated. I really don't think it's some groundbreaking revelation in 2019 to suggest that fiction and memory are falsified reorganizations of life and that all stories are inherently incomplete. (It's a theme literature has chewed over for hundreds of years and somehow Choi has tricked critics into finding her take on it new and innovative. It's also a theme that's been drubbed into exhaustion over the past decade or so--though with Trust Exercise it's in the guise of "literature" show more instead of beach reading).

This is not so much an unreliable narrator situation as the "there are more than two sides to every story" situation. However, I found the parts ill fitting, and the second section didn't in the slightest make me see the first part in a new way (maybe the revelation in the final short section did, a bit, but really, by that point I had ceased to care). Even more disappointingly, very shortly after the second part started, I correctly guessed both the big shocker moments. (Because I'm not usually a particularly perceptive reader when it comes to twists, I half suspect that I was *supposed* to guess these things, that they were, in fact, intentionally obvious, and that I fell into some trap of Choi's. But again, I really don't care.)

I wish it hadn't been so overpraised; I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more with lower expectations. show less

This is not a crime novel so much as a novel about the crimes we ourselves commit throughout our lives, our partial amnesia to them, and our chance to redeem ourselves. In prose that is not afraid to be precise and evocative, Choi engages us as detectives of the human heart, specifically that of Lee, the "person of interest" hounded by both his memories and the paparazzi when he becomes central to the unraveling of a mystery. The killer, reminiscent of the unibomber, is unknown, and Choi has show more us suspecting everyone from Lee himself to everyone in his past. Yet since the story is mainly told through Lee, we come to know him and realize that he is a "person of interest" because he resembles us, our sins of omission, our arrogance, our loneliness, our paranoia, our scaled-down dreams and tentative longings. An elderly Asian math professor is an unlikely candidate to win our hearts, but he does, slowly but surely. The undercurrent of racism in the way Lee is treated as a criminal by the media and his social circle is clear but understated, allowing us to realize with outrage that Lee has had to battle this discrimination ever since fleeing for his life from the Communist takeover of his country while still a young man. I love this book; could not put it down; and want to seek out everything I can by Susan Choi. Hers is a fine talent: a clear and lyrical prose style combined with an ability to plot that maintains suspense while drawing us in. Little details exquisitely drawn, from Lee's suburban hermitage of a home to the isolated mountain retreats of madmen are fresh and telling, psychological landscapes I won't soon forget. Her portrayal sof the crazy love of a mother for her infant, of a father for a toddler, of one outcast for another, are the stuff of great literature. Yet, again, this is a page turner worthy to stand beside the best crime fiction. I have never been more thrilled by a thriller than this one, and I hope to see Choi continue to grow as a writer because I plan to become one of her most avid readers. Come to this book without preconceptions: You will not be disappointed, and you will be moved. show less

Well I didn't expect my Tuesday reading group to dislike this book, but they did, almost all of them. To my mind it's a wonderful and sneaky novel of perspective and betrayal. Choi starts with a lushly written story of a teenage love affair in the hothouse confines of a performing arts high school, but she doesn't stop there. Two changes of perspective later, the reader is left wondering what, if anything, is reliable in this novel, so the 'trust exercise' extends to the reader and author show more themselves. Big lies? Complex misunderstandings? One protagonist, or two, or three? One villain or many? Is the first lush writing supposed to be natural to the author, or is it a novel within the novel? If you are someone who needs a single truth and perspective, this book is not for you.

Choi says she finished this book shortly before the #metoo movement got hot, although the story does deal with power dynamics between older men and teenagers, and a lot of my group's discussion was at that level. But in my opinion, the author plays with the idea of 'story' in our political as well as personal lives, which I think is a much more universal and philosophical topic.

I loved it. show less