Do you remember what adolescence smelled like?
The nerves, the excretions, the warm awkward bodies in airless rooms?
It’s actually a weird, fraught, gross era to romanticize.
There are three sections in Trust Exercise. All three are called “Trust Exercise.”
In the first, Sarah and David are adolescents in an elite art school, totally consumed by their relationship even before it is one. They crawl around in the dark and grasp for each other—they smell each other—because their theater teacher, Mr. Kingsley, asks them to do things like this. His strange little games will alter their trajectories.
As for those trajectories. This is a book best read, if you already feel an ember of interest, without reading more reviews about it first. The reasons that make this book unusually worthwhile are inherently spoilery even to acknowledge. Though I personally was most riveted by the first section, which is so intense and spongy, there are interesting detonations that follow. Let the author lead you toward them in the dark. PLEASE READ
