Trust By Hernan Diaz 2022 Riverhead Books 416 pgs
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is an astonishing piece of literature. It is a story within stories–four stories, to be precise–all connected. The first is purported to be a short novel about a ruthless financier during, before and after the market crash of 1929. The second is a memoir, a defense of his financial dealings and a tribute to his late wife, by a supposedly genuine financier, perhaps the real subject of the novel which precedes the memoir. The third is a longer account related by the secretary of the financier, who senses that the husband is hiding the genuine strength and intelligence of a devoted wife who submerged her own talents in a somewhat insipid marriage. The final section consists of extracts of the wife’s journal as she is dying in a Swiss sanatorium.
If this introduction seems confusing, the book itself is at first also hard to fathom. The first section seems pompous and verbose at first; the reader is tempted to give up on it. The second section sounds more straightforward, narrated by a financier, Andrew Bevel, who resembles the one described in the previous “novel.” The parts of it which relate to the narrator’s wife and her terminal illness are particularly convincing. The third section, narrated by the financier’s secretary, Ida Partenza, is more dramatic; it engages the reader immediately and begins to reveal depths which have been murky in the previous two sections. The fourth and final section, supposedly derived from the dying woman’s own journal, is urgent, revealing, genuine in its strength of feeling and its honesty.
The reader has to puzzle along, trying to reconcile the four versions of the story, the four narratives, the four styles, the four conclusions. Only the last few pages of the book pull it all together. And even then, there will be different impressions about the ultimate meaning of the whole. In some ways reading this book is like reading an elaborate detective story, one subtly crafted and skillfully executed. The author doesn’t tell us what is genuine and what is misleading, which narrator is reliable and which is not, where ego and memory intrude. It’s not an easy read–you have to pay attention– but it is a rewarding one. After all, the Pulitzer Prize is not awarded lightly!