I finished Trust Exercise a few days ago, and with that distance from its tricky, sinuous structure and its unexpected ending, my appreciation of it continues to increase. A novel that engages in the kinds of perspective shifts, reversals and ambiguities that this one does needs to earn those elements, and I think Trust Exercise does, through how well they're executed and how well they serve the book's concerns - about power, abuse, trauma and story-telling.
Each of the three sections is interesting - in its own right and as part of the whole - not only for how they contribute to the suspense of what will happen, or has happened, and the answers they provide to those questions, but also equally (if not more so) for what they reveal about the ways in which victims continue to be affected by abuse long after in their lives, and how this works through in the public or private narratives they construct to make sense of their experiences.
I think we're meant to take Claire's account as what 'really' happened; I also think it deliberately leaves unclear the details of that reality, which has the effect of highlighting that in some important ways it doesn't matter exactly what happened, because the outlines are enough that the enduring damage of the abuse at the stories' heart is showed to be inescapable regardless. It's a slippery interplay between specificity and overall theme, and doesn't leave much space for many of the conventional elements of characterisation and the ways they bring readers to recognise characters, let alone sympathise with them. Rather, Sarah, Karen and Claire (and, in a different way, David) are defined by the harm they've suffered and how they've tried to reckon with it - which itself is part of the point that Trust Exercise so sharply and (in its structure) originally makes.
Each of the three sections is interesting - in its own right and as part of the whole - not only for how they contribute to the suspense of what will happen, or has happened, and the answers they provide to those questions, but also equally (if not more so) for what they reveal about the ways in which victims continue to be affected by abuse long after in their lives, and how this works through in the public or private narratives they construct to make sense of their experiences.
I think we're meant to take Claire's account as what 'really' happened; I also think it deliberately leaves unclear the details of that reality, which has the effect of highlighting that in some important ways it doesn't matter exactly what happened, because the outlines are enough that the enduring damage of the abuse at the stories' heart is showed to be inescapable regardless. It's a slippery interplay between specificity and overall theme, and doesn't leave much space for many of the conventional elements of characterisation and the ways they bring readers to recognise characters, let alone sympathise with them. Rather, Sarah, Karen and Claire (and, in a different way, David) are defined by the harm they've suffered and how they've tried to reckon with it - which itself is part of the point that Trust Exercise so sharply and (in its structure) originally makes.
