Trust
Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel that plays with various texts as it scaffolds a story across genre: a novel, two memoirs (although one reads more like an incomplete autobiography), and a diary. Broken into four sections authored by four different characters, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel constructs a layered tale about a New York City financial mogul and his wife during the 1920s and 30s. Readers meet them first as the fictional couple of Benjamin and Helen Rask in Harold Vanner’s novel within a novel, “Bonds.” After the first section, memoirs replace the fiction with the flesh and blood characters of Andrew and Mildred Bevel. Of course, readers remember this novel is all fiction, so the fictionalizing of fictional characters might sound a bit dizzying; it is certainly postmodern. This clever fictionalizing a fiction is just one of the ways that Diaz’s Trust plays with genre, voice, and character. With four layers of storytelling told in four ways, the reader experiences characters and plot in Trust through the fragments of each section. As a result. Trust forces the reader to surmise what the real story might be. Diaz’s novel provides the ultimate exercise in critical reading. In the end, readers come away with the realization that there is never just one story to tell.
Every character in Trust is a storyteller, although they all approach the style and process of their tales differently. In addition to the Rask/Bevel couple, a third character, Ida Partenza, becomes fundamental in the story, although readers do not meet her until midway through the novel. There is also the novelist Harold Vanner, whose “novel” comes first, though his character is only present in Trust’s margins. Through Andrew Bevel’s unfinished autobiography and Ida’s own memoir, readers see how storytelling is complex and impactful. Ida comes to Andrew’s story having learned from her father that you can’t always believe a story someone tells, regardless the teller’s earnestness. Her experiences with the Bevels’ tales only reinforces that lesson. What’s more, the reader along with young Ida must unpack the motivations, biases, and agendas behind each story’s telling. What Ida learns over a lifetime, and what the reader must face by the novel’s conclusion, is that questions will always remain.
Beyond storytelling, many themes enter Trust. Issues of early twentieth-century anarchism, Italian immigration, the overreach of true affluence, mental health crisis, terminal illness, philanthropy, New York stock exchange and trading, music, and the financial sector of the early twentieth century are among its many subjects. In addition to the obvious allusions that Trust’s title makes to the world of finance, it also scrutinizes the trust readers place in storytellers. Diaz’s novel reminds readers—a reminder we surely need in this age of information—that every story, whether delivered as fiction or nonfiction, is one perspective and often includes, whether consciously or not, its author’s personal agenda. When readers take a collection of stories about the same thing and place them side by side, as we do in Trust, only then does the “truth” begin to be visible even if it is a confusing reality. In fact, the more blurred the stories become, the more true they may be; questions and confusion are no doubt a part of truth.
Bibliography:
Diaz, Hernan. Trust. Riverhead Books: 2022.
A Few Great Passages:
“Only a fool would distinguish past from present in such a way. The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries as hard as it can, to become the past. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy. The future happens” (99-100).
“[T]he closer one is to a source of power, the quieter it gets. Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them” (232).
