... intricate, cunning and consistently surprising ... Diaz’s own prose keeps an antiseptic distance of its own, no matter who his narrator might be ... Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person. Diaz relies in contrast on a far one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and dispassionate. In both books, he reports on his characters’ inner lives instead of dramatizing them, and in Vanner’s hands especially, the result reads more like a biography than a novel: a narrative without dialogue, in which Rask’s life is given to us more often in summary than in scenes ... It’s a disorienting but effective way to present a character who seems almost entirely without an inner life of his own, whose whole being lies in anticipating the clickety-click of a ticker tape ... much of the novel’s pleasure derives from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises ... a strangely self-reflexive work: strangely, because unlike some metafictional exercises this book does more than chase its own tail. The true circularity here lies in the workings of capital, in a monetary system so self-referential that it has forgotten what Diaz himself remembers. For Trust always acknowledges the world that lies outside its own pages. It recognizes the human costs of a great fortune, even though its characters can see nothing beyond their own calculations; they are most guilty when most innocent, most enthralled by the abstraction of money itself.
Diaz doesn’t endow Håkan with much interiority; we rarely get access to his thoughts, and his conversations are stymied by the language barrier—a clever twist on the strong, silent type ... A curious unevenness begins to surface in the text, as if the writing were giving notes to itself ... There is something deft and quite funny about this maneuver—in peeking into the unfinished manuscript of a vain billionaire’s memoir, one feels a surprising intimacy, even as you learn the shortcomings of the subject’s imagination ... Diaz leads the reader on a journey from abstractions—all that literature is capable of representing, including the markets and moneymen that rule the world—down to something small, private, and experiential. Perhaps Trust, in the end, makes a surprisingly un-postmodern case for what the novel can do. It can deliver discrete, luminous sensations. It can make one subjectivity clear at a time. And it can help you appreciate experience—your hand in front of your face—before it disappears.
[An] enthralling tour de force ... Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory ... As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money ... Diaz’s debut, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some ... Wordplay is Trust’s currency ... In Diaz’s accomplished hands we circle ever closer to the black hole at the core of Trust ... Trust is a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery ... He spins a larger parable, then, plumbing sex and power, causation and complicity. Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read.
Diaz's ingenious new fiction, told in four overlapping parts, challenges conventional story lines of another favorite American theme: capitalism and the accumulation of vast wealth ... With great skill and using multiple voices, Diaz employs his inventive structure to offer intriguing insights into the hidden roles played by subservient women.
Everything in Trust is in its place. Like four exquisite dioramas, Diaz has set up all of these stories with great precision to present two fundamental questions: Why do we tell stories? And at what cost are those stories told? The stories in question revolve around finance, power, and identity, are all self-serving, and are about much more than what one person does to another ... a remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction. This unquestionably smart and sophisticated novel not only mirrors truth, but helps us to better understand it.
Trust is a rich and prismatic—though ultimately anticlimactic—novel interested in the twin meanings of speculation, both the act of amassing wealth through the stock market and of creating stories to explain and define the past. Mr. Diaz’s method is to juxtapose competing interpretations of the life of his character Andrew Bevel ... Mr. Diaz’s skillful mimicry...pays real dividends in the complex portion of the book narrated by Ida, whose memories, not all of them reliable, mediate among the portrayals of Bevel created by his critics and the one Bevel sought to establish for himself ... A highly stimulating sense of narrative pressure builds up as the fictions invented around these enigmas collide and bleed into one another ... I am chagrined to say that much of this excellent work is undone in the concluding entries from Mildred’s diary, which effectively erase all of the novel’s finely poised mysteries. With these Mr. Diaz chooses straightforward explanation over ambiguity, leaving readers with a predictable—and, in itself, highly artificial—lesson about the way women have been written out of history. The coda left me with only one remaining unanswerable question: In the final estimation, just how good or bad is a good book with a bad ending?
It’s a rare thing to fall in love at first conceit. But...it’s as if Hernan Diaz’s latest novel, Trust, was built in a lab to hit my pleasure nodes ... And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing here, like a gorgeous cut of meat that needed a touch more seasoning and a bit more sear ... Though I quite like Trust, and recommend you read it, it’s a book whose own sparseness feels mismatched with its gilded action, and a book which may be just a touch too tidy for its own good ... I liked it best of all, though, when Trust was researching itself. A vignette from one character’s childhood recurs over the book in multiple sections and modifies itself until a memorable, disturbing climax when it reappears in an unlikely mouth. Part 4 is the highlight of the novel, a masterful segment of a character’s diary with a tiny bit of magic and a twist I won’t spoil ... One of the most admirable traits of Trust is its novelistic ambition ... What is odd is that Trust fully blooms when out of sight — I’ve liked it more in the writing of this review, as I’ve circled back through, relishing the characters and hijinks.
The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book ... In each grandly choreographed chapter of this novella, disparate movements are gradually brought to conclusions both surprising and inevitable ... when their fateful punishment arrives, it’s suitably shocking and humiliating, a melodrama of debasement designed to reassure readers that the ethical accounting of the universe cannot be cheated ... sounds repellently overcomplicated, but in execution it’s an elegant, irresistible puzzle. The novel isn’t just about the way history and biography are written; it’s a demonstration of that process. By the end, the only voice I had any faith in belonged to Diaz.
... sharp and affecting ... Such persuasive — almost hypnotic — storytelling provides the thrust of Trust, in which Diaz illustrates how a fine provenance can engender an absurd belief in a tall tale ... This quartet of narratives works like a combination lock: by revisiting events we recognise pressures imposed and felt and truth click into place. We also see how capital can 'bend and align reality' ... Part of the pleasure in reading Trust is in trying to work out where Andrew’s arrogance ends and his ghostwriter’s flair begins ... captures the swagger of the robber barons and the early days of late capitalism, as the seductive allure of playing the stocks shows its teeth. What might seem a less dramatic milieu than the wagon trains and gun-toting prospectors of his debut in fact delivers an oppressively baroque atmosphere of intrigue and moral funk ... The tone switches easily between the comic and the tragic ... it is in his ugly-beautiful portrait of great wealth that Diaz shows his brilliance ... In this literary Rubik’s Cube, Diaz provides a viable, and hugely entertaining, argument that once a pen is put to paper an element of veracity is always lost.
'Bonds' is all very Edith Wharton, measured and poised in tone. But Diaz can apparently channel any style and Trust’s second book is a delicious send-up of the hubristic autobiographies of 'Great American Men' ... Unlike most novelists who cover the moneyed, Diaz takes a long, hard, Michael Lewisy look at the nitty-gritty of how wealth is made. Even for the financially illiterate he makes it fascinating. Exchanges on Marx, capitalism and fiction as a commodity zing ... Diaz knows how to build a narrative puzzle ... You sense that Diaz could master any genre and Trust is metafiction at its best, unpredictable, clever and massively enjoyable. In the end it’s the women written out of the myths of Wall Street who get the final word.
The four bickering chronicles are layered, bundled and sold to us like dubious securities. But, quite unlike a wad of dodgy mortgages, Trust is more than the sum of its parts ... Hernan Diaz has produced a charming, glowing novel, best read at least twice. But Trust isn’t merely clever: the bones are lovely, and so is the skin. It is funny. It becomes a family saga, with Andrew and Mildred in every role. It is a polyphonic Russian doll of a narrative that somehow avoids gimmickry and manages to look at itself from every angle, courting self-deception even as it tries to win our trust.
... one of those novels that's always pulling a fast one on a reader ... The opening section of Trust...is so sharply realized, it's disorienting to begin the novel's next section, composed of notes on a story that sounds like the one we've just read. But, then, Diaz lures us readers into once again suspending our disbelief when we reach the captivating third section of his novel ... wired with booby traps, blowing the whole artifice up before our wide-open eyes ... an ingeniously constructed historical novel with a postmodern point. Throughout, Diaz makes a connection between the realms of fiction and finance ... an artistic fortune.
... one of the least derivative, most eccentrically ambitious fiction writers I’ve read in a long while ... As compelling as this is—coldly and beautifully rendered, with remarkable psychological precision and all the fascinatingly lurid details of a life of almost lunatic privilege—one feeling it engenders in the reader, as the story moves toward its climax, is that it is, in some logistical sense, moving too fast: that is, the history of the Rasks will surely wrap up less than a third of the way through the hefty novel one is holding ... To describe it past a certain point is to risk giving too much away. One of the many levels on which it succeeds is that of a puzzle, and the further one ventures into summary, the more apparent the outlines of the puzzle become. In its first two books especially, much of what propels the reader through Trust is the simple, suspenseful question of whether these disparate parts, with their ghostly echoes, will unveil a whole at all.
... historical fiction that thrums with the energy of today’s crises ... I confess that the novel-within-a-novel conceit is a pet peeve of mine. All too often the embedded stories aren’t as good as their frames require them to be. But 'Bonds', the opening political novel-within-a-novel by the fictitious Harold Vanner, succeeds on its own terms before Diaz puts it to other uses. Matching the era’s writing, Vanner’s immersive novel evokes Edith Wharton’s perceptive eye and the muckrakers’ moral intensity. Finely sketched details accrete into compelling portraits. And the plot—a political fable about a capitalist’s hubris—builds steadily to a dramatic conclusion. And then Diaz starts the story over ... Like any good experimental novel, Trust—a clean, linear narrative until this point—shatters to fragments. And, as with any good detective novel, the reader must parse contradictory accounts, dodge red herrings, and hunt for clues to find the answers. For all his deep fascination with political economy, Diaz has written a well-paced, suspenseful novel ... This intricate novel possesses a rare, fractal beauty: patterns first noticeable in the tiny twigs of its sentences recur in the branches of its sections and yet again in the shape of the whole.
The novel’s Rashomon-like structure is buttressed by Diaz’s astute grasp of the ways in which we reliably deceive ourselves, which in turn is compounded by the book’s central obsession: the creepy similarities between the worlds of fiction and finance. Even the manuscript titles feel like lexical interventions ... Diaz’s genius lies in gradually revealing that just as concrete goods and human labour are transmuted into tradeable shares and commodities for profit, novelists like Vanner tweak a real-life cancer diagnosis into a psychiatric ailment because it makes for a more riveting story ... the rare novel that incorporates both its source material and afterlife. The contours of the plot might feel familiar at times, but you’re propelled forward by the twists and turns of the novel’s form, the conviction that Diaz has another trick up his sleeve.
... poses questions of authorship and ownership at every turn: when did wealth become the defining element of every American success story? What values and costs can be ascribed to the 'Great Man' theory of history? And to whom do such men owe their greatest debts? If you imagine a brilliantly twisted mix of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Virginia Woolf’s journals, JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Ryan Gosling’s breaking of the fourth wall in The Big Short, you’ll get some sense of the surprising hybrid Diaz has created ... A Borgesian sense of play imbues almost every page of Trust, along with a dash of Italo Calvino’s love of exploring different versions of a single idea or city. Through perfectly formed sentences and the skilful unpicking of certainties, Trust creates a great portrait of New York across an entire century of change ... so packed full of ironies that it can sometimes feel airless. But it is also a work possessed of real power and purpose. It invites us to think about why the category of imaginative play we most heavily reward as a society is the playing of financial markets, often at a heavy cost. It’s a testament to Diaz’s cunning abilities as a writer that you end his book thinking that – if truth is your goal – you might be better off relying on a novelist than a banker.
Destined to become one of the great novels of our time, this ingenious work more than lives up to the hype. A literary conundrum, composed of four books in one, this surprising, engrossing and beautifully executed novel confirms Diaz’s status as a virtuoso of storytelling ... The competing narratives across the four streams interrogate fact vs fiction, as the narrator desperately tries to extract the truth from the murky manipulations of the affluent elite. Each evolution is a revelation that deepens the reading experience without any inertia creeping in. The result is a novel that spans the entirety of the 20th century, provoking the reader to confront the deceptions in society that sustain us. Who and what we can trust within the complex morality structures of a capitalist world is examined on both a micro and a macro level to great effect ... one of the greatest strengths of this novel is its pleasing unpredictability which guarantees the reader an exhilarating experience ... Despite its stylistic trickery, however, the novel never succumbs to any sense of gimmick. At the heart of this searing examination of capitalism, class and wealth is a fundamental question about the power of storytelling and meaning of fiction. This soulful quest is what elevates Truth from a cold anti-capitalist meditation on mercenary greed and sordid influence, to something that speaks to the heart of humanity. Diaz has accomplished that rare thing – a literary page-turner that offers compulsive reading with exquisite prose. Having already been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut, Trust firmly establishes Diaz as one of the great American authors working today.
The degree of overlap between Benjamin Rask in the novel and Andrew Bevel in the memoir is for the reader to assess as the book goes on, though not a great deal has been done to bring curiosity to the boil, or even above room temperature ... When a novel doubles one of its formal elements there is likely to be a halving elsewhere. In Trust the duplication of narratives, these life stories both convergent and divergent, has the effect of slowing a forward movement that was already very moderate. Whether it’s Benjamin and Helen or Andrew and Mildred, these are bloodless figures, with any intrinsic interest overshadowed and made almost irrelevant by the economic power they wield and represent ... It would have been a shrewder move to present Bonds only in extracts, as Ida reads them to understand what Bevel wants from her (this is where the story proper gets going anyway), rather than starting the book with an uncontextualised slab of prose that isn’t engaging as narrative or plausible as an artefact of its period ... Diaz has gone to some trouble to give Ida Partenza an alarmingly vibrant back story ... The turns towards realism in Trust are consistently countered by turns away from it ... As if to make up for the lack of drama in the earlier part of the book, this section (by far the longest) skips through a series of potential genres, never quite settling on one ... When the mystery is solved here, it isn’t at all like the dénouement of the detective stories Ida describes, where a threatened harmony is restored, everything made clear, everything explained, everything shown to be well with the world. The ahistorical revelations of the last section are all that Diaz cares about, to the point where the preceding sections crumble in the mind the moment they have served their purpose. And if faulty construction seems to him a small price to pay for the wish-fulfilment in store, it’s possible to disagree. Readers of the book can reasonably expect its various strands to be pulled into a tight knot, or, failing that, to be arranged in a pretty bow.
... wondrous ... Diaz is brilliant at dissecting literary conventions and transforming them into something new ... Whereas the novels of Wharton, James, and Fitzgerald anatomize the agony and ecstasy of privilege and affluence but not the details of their accretion, the accumulation of money and its role as a driver of social forces occupy the minds of Diaz’s characters and advance much of the plot ... Diaz has punctured two of the defining characteristics of American history: rugged individualism and the exceptionalism of capitalist enterprise.
... an audacious period piece that—over the course of four acts, each framed as a 'book'—seeks to undo the hardened conventions undergirding myths about American power. And it deftly illustrates how stories about the nation’s exceptionalism are inextricable from the circulation of money ... The progression suggests that one way fiction might approach the depiction of capitalist totality and its impossible forms is by presenting it, however futilely, through incommensurable shards ... Rarely does Diaz inhabit the perspective of the worker, except when that worker comes within proximity to power (like Ida). More often, he gives texture to individuals who stand in (sometimes self-consciously) for the broader world of finance as a way of drawing readers closer to the abstract complexities of capital accumulation ... We may not get close to grasping the heart of the mystery. But that’s hardly the point. Instead, we might at least begin to perceive how little it is we can see at all.
Confidence, a quality as attractive in a book as it is in a person, brims from every page of Hernan Diaz’s Trust, from its assured style to its complex structure ... There’s lots to chew on in Trust, mainly on how reality bends to power and its handmaiden money. It asks us to question what we believe and to challenge received wisdom — a novel is about knowing we are reading a lie but wanting to believe it anyway — though it indulges in some lazy tropes of its own: the men are all puffed up with certainty, the women tentative and misunderstood ... But the bigger problem is this: the book promises that it will undermine its own stories, so the first two parts, Bonds and My Life, feel like a preface to the real thing, yet they take up half the book. That’s a lot of homework. It wouldn’t matter if they were intrinsically interesting but Bonds has a fussy, ponderous style ... Here and in Mildred’s closing account we finally feel we’re seeing through the eyes of real people: it’s original and surprising. Otherwise, Trust is just too well behaved and dull, the literary equivalent of one of those beautifully made but boring films directed by Robert Redford. Shouldn’t a book this tricksy be a bit more playful, full of eccentricity and character, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire? Alas, too much of Trust is like its antihero Andrew Bevel — all smart, no heart.
Like a tower of gifts waiting to be unwrapped, Trust offers a multitude of rewards to be discovered and enjoyed, its sharp observations so finely layered as to demand an immediate rereading ... Each section contains a compelling perspective that builds upon the one that came before ... After a slow, steady build, Trust shifts into high-octane gear in part three, an engrossing memoir by noted journalist Ida Partenzan ... If this series of interconnected narratives already sounds complicated, don’t worry: Each section flows easily into the next in Diaz’s supremely skilled hands, with increasing momentum and intrigue. Throughout, he examines the wide disparities between rich and poor, truth and fiction, and the insidious ways in which these divides have long been crafted. The fourth and final section, pages from Mildred’s diary, contains a startling twist to this literary feast—a wonderfully satisfying end to Diaz’s beautifully composed masterpiece.
A chorus of inharmonious but overlapping stories that teases the reader until the very last page. The novel is made up of four books, each a discrete volume, but in conversation with the others ... The final two books are by far the most revealing, their disclosures destabilising and complicating what we have already been told, but to go into the details would, I fear, spoil the fun. What I will say is that Diaz deftly illustrates how the worlds of finance and fiction are built on similarly shifting sands, right down to a shared lexicography ... The knotty ingenuity of Trust makes it easy to see how it’s won its place on this year’s Booker longlist. Destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels, it’s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner.
Diaz...writes exquisitely about the luminous unhappiness that money and power ultimately bring, and how they can diminish lives ... It thoroughly deserves its Booker nod: it is a clever, literary kaleidoscope that constantly challenges the realities it puts forward, requiring you to step back, and look again. You may have to read it more than once.
While Diaz's book is an ambitious formal experiment and an engrossing study in unreliable narration, it also manages to be an ideological tour de force.
Diaz...has breathed new life and wit into an old trick ... Diaz is an artful, intelligent writer, but injecting drama into reading the ticker tape is a bit like drafting a novel about counting cards or checking the track times of race horses ... The quartet of voices is uneven and disjointed, as unreliable narratives are meant to be. More critically, the central story is not vivid or engaging enough to sustain a reader's attention or do justice to Diaz's technique.
For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz’s novel is compulsively readable, and despite taking place in the early 1900s, the plot reads like an indictment of the start of the twenty-first century with its obsession with obscure financial instruments and unhinged capital accumulation. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance.
...more than simply succeeding at its genre exercises, the novel brilliantly weaves its multiple perspectives to create a symphony of emotional effects ... No one document tells the whole story, but the collection of palimpsests makes for a thrilling experience and a testament to the power and danger of the truth—or a version of it—when it’s set down in print. A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.
...a kaleidoscope of capitalism run amok in the early 20th century, which also manages to deliver a biography of its irascible antihero and the many lives he disfigures during his rise to the cream of the city’s crop. Grounded in history and formally ambitious, this succeeds on all fronts. Once again, Diaz makes the most of his formidable gifts.
