Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition. In “Trust Exercise,” a woman called Karen (not her real name, she tells us) confronts her youthful relationship with a much older man and finds she cannot arrive at any comforting conclusions. She feels victimized but also entirely responsible. Her feelings for young women in similar situations are “violently mixed”; “these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.” She wants them to shut up but hates them for their silence; she wants them to move on but cannot forgive them if they refuse to take revenge. Where does this leave her? What should she do with her pain? (I advise against following her example. Mostly.)

Image Susan Choi, whose most recent novel is “Trust Exercise.” Credit... Heather Weston

“We all make our own choices,” a character in a play in “Trust Exercise” says. “Do we?” responds another. “Milkman,” a stream-of-consciousness novel dictated by a young, isolated woman stalked by a shadowy paramilitary figure, asks what sexual consent might mean to people who have never had any experience of control: “I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.”

#MeToo is a moment full of reappraisals — of beloved artists, public figures, ourselves. How do we respond to this feeling of unmooring? By tightening our grasp on what we have always known? By jettisoning one set of scripts for another? In “Women Talking,” based on a true story, the women and girls living in a fictitious Mennonite colony in South America called Molotschna discover that men from their community have been drugging and raping them for years. They gather in a hayloft, and decide what to do: Stay, leave, fight. Over the course of the novel, much of it written in dialogue of the plainest possible language, they ask what separates justice from punishment. They re-examine every one of their premises: “When we know something we stop thinking about it, don’t we?” one character says.

Image Anna Burns, author of “Milkman,” which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Credit... Eleni Stefanou

It’s a habit of mind this woman is talking about — a habit of skepticism toward the self, the ability and willingness to change your mind. These novels offer a kind of training in this way of being. They are full of narrative tripwires that force us to pay attention, reassess our reflexive responses, revise what we think the story is about. “His Favorites” has a circular structure, with vertigo-inducing shifts in time. “Trust Exercise” has odd, double-jointed sentences that flip between points of view; Karen refers to herself variously as “I,” “she” and “we” — experiencing herself as both subject and object. In “Milkman” there are no names at all — characters are “Somebody McSomebody” and “longest friend” — and only a few proper nouns. In several of these books, there is a fundamental confusion about what we are reading in the first place — is it a novel within a novel? Who is narrating? Do they have a right to the story? A striking number of these books — “The Friend,” “Asymmetry,” Trust Exercise,” “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Those Who Knew” — all involve a parallel plot, in which the story of a relationship, either lopsided or abusive, is juxtaposed with the story of a character who draws upon the experience of another in their own writing, often a tell-all.

As an acting exercise, the drama teacher in “Trust Exercise” would turn off the lights in his classroom and have the students find their way around by touch. He’d watch them, talk to them: “Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?”

The answer, of course, is always. “We’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other,” Choi writes. “You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled.” We’re all here together, in the dark.