“There is a better world” a man said. “But it’s more expensive.”

Trust is a novel in 4 parts, each section telling a similar story in a different form. It opens with a novel about an American finance tycoon - a genius at work on Wall Street in the 1920s - and his philanthropist wife. The next section acts as the autobiography of the real (fictional) tycoon on whom the novel is based, as he seeks to clear up the slanderous claims made against him. The third section is presented by the ghostwriter of the autobiography, who details the unembellished truth of how the autobiography was written and her attempts to discover more about the death of the tycoon’s wife, and to locate his late wife’s diary - which is presented to us as the fourth and final section.

This structure is unique and engaging, as questions from previous sections are answered without fanfare later on, leaving the reader to put the pieces together and uncover which parts are true. The novel as a whole serves as an exercise in the concept of the unreliable narrator - we are presented with 4 narrators over the course of the book, and things that we initially take as true are later shown to be anything but. Diaz goes as far as to show characters in later sections creating the very lies that we have earlier accepted as true - which can, at times, feel a bit heavy-handed and over-explained, though I think still works well as a storytelling device.

While the book at first glance seems to be about finance (and there IS a lot about finance within), it becomes clear that Diaz is far more interested in telling a story about truth, and how those with money and power can control the narratives that we come to accept as truth.

I had issues with a couple of subplots, largely in the third section (one extortion subplot is resolved too quickly, and the pacing is slowed by a character explaining why he dislikes Marxism though agrees with it in places). Ultimately though, these issues are minor. This is an excellent novel about truth and power, and I think likely to be on award longlists later in the year.

Thanks to Netgalley and PanMacMillan for the e-ARC!

This is a tale which bridges two cultures (art/literature and high finance), but which is very much a book of two halves (the first almost deliberately weak, the second intriguing) and which left me in two minds (hence my rating – a mix of a 4*+ concept and a 2* execution).

CP Snow famously wrote an article/lecture/essay book on the chasm that had opened between the cultures of arts and science – in my view (and as someone with a foot in both camps) there is a similar divide now between the worlds of literary fiction and finance. If you can find someone in finance who reads they are likely to read non-fiction books with possible some genre fiction – and similarly few literary fiction books even cover finance. Of those that do many seem to misunderstand it (for example confusing the direction of interest rate change impacts) – and even my book of 2022 Natasha Brown’s “Assembly” uses banking as a canvass on which to focus a social mobility/meritocracy lens on the topic of colonialism and its lasting impacts (we do not know what job the unnamed narrator does for her bank – just her seniority).

So I welcome this book’s explicit aim to address that divide and to provide a literary exploration of capital, investment and banking and via one dictionary definition of the title. The author has further stated his aim as examining and deconstructing one of the foundational myths/classic American narratives of American society (the role of free market capitalism and the investment markets and particularly the self-made wealthy entrepreneur) in the same way that his first novel “In The Distance” did with the Western.

At the same time the author wanted to examine the other definition of Trust and in particular the idea of the trust that it is implicit in fiction and reading “Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. As you read Trust and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text.”

Because this is a book written in four very different parts – each with a different writer, a different narrative voice, a different style and a different purpose. The Washington Post and leading Goodreads reviewer Ron Charles in his review says this quartet of very different stories is “what Wall Street Traders would call a 4-for-1 stock split” – thus illustrating perfectly my contended literature/finance divide, given that split into four identical parts is almost the exact opposite to what Diaz does. Interesting though I think some form of more identical split would have worked much better here (see later).

The book starts with around a 100 page pastiche of (or possibly tribute to) Edith Wharton and her fiction which not only documented the Gilded Age of America but which was towards the end of the literary realism movement – a novel called “Bonds” by Harold Vanner which tells the story of a Wall Street banker/trader/tycoon Benjamin Rask – his taking advantage of the 1920s bull market and then his more controversial role in the 1929 Crash; alongside the story of his art patron/philanthropist wife Helen and her mental instability and treatment for that in Europe.

The second section is around a 100 page pastiche (and in this case definitely not a tribute to) the self-aggrandising (if unfinished) business autobiography of a Wall Street banker/trader/tycoon Andrew Revel – his role in growing the nation’s prosperity by helping the 1920s bull market and then his saddened realisation that speculation had driven the market too high leading him to evade the 1929 Crash; alongside the story of his art patron/philanthropist late-wife Mildred and her emotional and mental stability ahead of her treatment for cancer in Europe.

The third section (and easily the strongest of the book) is written by Ida Partenza – the daughter of an Italian anarchist effectively in America as a political refugee – she is hired by Revel to write the second part of the novel as a counterbalance to the sensationalist impact of the first (which he and everyone else regards as his lightly fictionalised biography). While researching the book (to the limited permitted by Revel who wishes to tightly control the narrative) Ida finds that neither Vanner or Revel’s portrayal of Mildred seems to meet the complexity of her character but is unable to discover the true Mildred. Parts of this section are narrated closer to our present day as the now elderly Ida visits a museum made of the Revel home (where she wrote her book) and explores the archives.

The fourth and shortest part of the book (albeit still much stronger than the first two) is Ida’s final discovery – a very fragmentary diary written by Mildred before her death, while being treated in Europe, which contains a revelation as to the real story of Revel (and his roles in both the bull market and crash) which to be honest has been pretty easy to guess from the beginning.

As I have implied this is a book of two halves – the first two sections for me were very weak although mercifully easy to skip through at a quick pace, as my brother’s review says “there is barely a word that is not wasted”. In the first section in particular I started writing down passages and turns of phrase that annoyed me before deciding to go for the pastiche rather than tribute option. What I was less clear on was the author’s decision to lead with the entirety of the two sections rather than having the four sections interleaved through the novel. I believe the aim was to draw the reader into each story and to the world it posits before revealing another layer of the story – but neither for me was sufficiently well written to draw me in so spoiling the effect. Further there are by now myriad mainstream media and Goodreads reviews which make the set up of the first two parts (as revealed in the third) clear which also negated any impact of revelation – and in some ways that is anyway to the book’s benefits as I think many modern readers taking the first section (at least) on face value may well have bailed.

I am sure there is a point for this – as the book itself says “the worst literature, my father would say, is always written with the best intentions”.

The obviousness of the “reveal” in the fourth section I can live with better – as the book seems to strongly signpost this by discussing (on two separate but importantly linked occasions) someone recounting a detective style novel and someone else (older or wiser) having to effectively pretend that the reveal of the murderer is a surprise.

There is though a lot to like in the novel in terms of its concept – both at a macro and more micro level.

On the overall level I liked (while not thinking it entirely worked) the ideas of linking the sustained and collective illusion (or perhaps collective decision to place collective faith in a narrative) that lies behind not just fictional stories themselves, but non-fictional accounts, behind national (and national identity) stories, behind political movements and also behind financial markets.

On the micro level I enjoyed for example: the exploration of the marginalisation of (and even worse co-opting or blatant stealing of) female voices and ideas; the idea that a blend of human psychology with mathematical analysis is key to investment success (and it reminded me of the intersection of art-empathy-gut call & data-science-hard facts at the heart of commercial insurance underwriting); the fragmentary ideas in the fourth section about the transition from literary realism to literary modernism (and its equivalent in music).

Set in early twentieth-century New York, Hernan Diaz’s ambitious, complicated novel is a clever exploration of truth, perception and morality told through the story of Andrew and Mildred Bevel: one apparently the most successful financier Wall Street has seen; the other a philanthropist lauded for endowments made to the arts.

Andrew Bevel has used his mathematical prowess to exploit the markets throughout the roaring 1920s, emerging from the ’29 Crash even wealthier than he was before. Already a renowned philanthropist, his wife Mildred diverts her charity work to helping the poor, barely scratching the surface of her husband’s profits. In 1938, a novel is published portraying this couple in a less than flattering light, soon becoming a bestseller. Desperate to rescue his reputation, Bevel employs a young woman with a talent for writing who finds herself puzzled by his insistence on painting his wife as a homely, insipid woman.

Diaz structures his novel in four discrete sections beginning with Harold Vanner’s Bonds, the novel that seizes public attention. It’s followed by fragments of Bevel’s self-serving autobiography which he employs Ida to ghost write. Several decades later, Mildred’s almost indecipherable, fragmented journal offers Ida the solution to the puzzle of his wife’s importance to Bevel. It’s a complicated structure which could easily have become incoherent but it works well. Diaz gives each section a clear and distinct voice. For me, Ida’s section is the most enjoyable with its juxtaposition of her exasperating Italian anarchist father, full of colourful stories, with Bevel, still obsessed with playing the markets yet intent on Ida producing a hagiography which will rescue his reputation. The denouement didn’t entirely work for me – I’m not sure I wanted a solution to the Mildred puzzle – but the journey to it had me gripped.

3,5 stars
I had hoped I would love this book more as I’m making this book of the month in the bookshop I work in. In the end, I found it OK but not excellent.
The idea is fascinating; telling more or less the same story through various means (a novel, an autobiography, the version of a biographer, and a diary). It makes you wonder what exactly is the true story? If there is a true story of course 😉. There is a revaluation in the end providing the reader with a believable truth though.
I did like the themes of money & capitalism, truth, misogyny, and women’s place in history.
This book smart and interesting but not all parts worked for me. I’m afraid the second part bored
me.
Thank you Pan MacMillan and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

This will, no doubt, be one of my favorite novels of the year. This book is about a wealthy investor (Andrew Bevel) and his reclusive wife (Mildred Bevel) who actually made a lot of money when the stock market crashed in 1929. After a scathing biography is published about the Bevels, Andrew hires Ida Partenza to write his autobiography. This is a novel within a novel with a memoir added to that. Diaz does a sublime job of twisting the realities and the myths of these characters and keeps the reader wondering who or what can be trusted. The characters are quite cold and unlikeable, but I was fascinated with Mildred (or was it Helen?) from the very first page.

Recommended for fans of Edith Wharton, old New York, and historical fiction.

Trust by Hernan Diaz has an interesting, and in some respects brave, structure, albeit one that many readers have commented seems to have been borrowed from Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, which is perhaps a clever metafictional approach given metafictional clumsiness is at the heart of the novel, as is the theme of men taking credit for women's achievements.

The best way to read this book might to be to do without foreknowledge of this structure, but the high level of publicity and authorial interviews makes that difficult, and so I will cover it in my review. The novel is split into four parts, three of them novellas and the last a brief coda:

Bonds by Harold Vanner
My Life by Andrew Bevel
A Memoir Remembered by Ida Partenza
Futures by Mildred Bevel

Bonds is the loosely fictionalised biography (fictional even within the novel's world) of a 1920-30s Wall Street tycoon Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen, published (in the novel's world) in the early 1930s. It is written in the style of an Edith Wharton, although Vanner (and perhaps also Diaz?) is a rather poor imitator of her prose, and the novella is (deliberately?) badly written.

Rask is based on the real-life (in the novel's world - I will stop adding that for fear of this review becoming as tedious as Vanner's prose) Andrew Revel, whose late wife was called Mildred. And My Life is Revel's own autobiographical account, designed to counter Vanner's scurrilous portrayal, both of Andrew Revel's part in the late 1920s Wall Street crash but also Vanner's version of Mildred, who Vanner has dying after severe mental health problems, but who Vanner portrays as a simple, but kindly soul. Or rather My Life is a partly completed account, with lots of 'add some anecdotes here' type comments left in the manuscript for example:

<i>His unique, discreetly creative approach. Free Banking Era. Opportunities in currency fluctuation, etc. 2–3 examples.</i>

Again this isn't a great read as the tone is deliberately rather pompous and (disappointingly) in both sections, the details of the operation of the stock market during the fascinating memoir are as sketchy as parts of Revel's incomplete work. Hence my 'brave' comment earlier - for the reader, a pastiche of a badly written book is still a badly written book. Although both Bonds and My Life are quick reads, ideally skimmed, as there is seldom a word which isn't wasted.

The third part is the novel's highlight. Ida Partenza proves to be Revel's typist (as he would have seen her) or ghost-writer (in reality), responsible for My Life. In A Memoir Remembered she is recounting, decades later, how she became involved with Revel and with his autobiography. Parts of this story were compelling, although a side story involving her jealous boyfriend, a journalist, seemed more designed to set up part four of the book, rather than add anything, and that of her Italian anarchist father felt like it deserved another book.

The reminisces on the past in A Memoir Remembered are interspersed with Partenza's account of contemporary visit to the Revel's former home, now turned into a museum. There she finds a diary written by Mildred Revel.

And the novel's brief final section is that diary, written from the Swiss sanitorium where Mildred (and Helen, albeit from a different cause) ended her days. And this section contains a revelation that had been rather heavy-handidly signposted throughout.

Ultimately, not entirely successful, at times deliberately so. 2 stars

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

Intricate, absorbing metafiction about how so many of the things that make up our lives—money, lineage, marriage—are stories we tell. The structure of the novel makes you feel like you're reading a very, very compelling documentary, more voiceover than character study, but it works. My favourite section was unfortunately also the shortest, but that's a minor quibble; overall, this was a fascinating read and I'd highly recommend it, especially if you can go in knowing as little about the "plot" as possible!

A modern classic in the making, Trust is one of the most fascinating novels I've read all year.

Trust is a novel that is, at its most basic level, about capital. This is very much front and center in its first section, "Bonds," where one of our two main leads is the hugely successful and nigh indomitable Wall Street financier, Benjamin Rask. Here the novel plants the seeds of the ideas it's going to explore in its next three sections, namely the kind of mutability that is inherent to capital and the way it operates. So the novel is interested in looking at the many permutations of capital: how one thing is transmuted into another, all these different "mediations" that can and do make capital seem so abstract for those at the top pulling its strings.

It's not a stretch, then, to go from exploring the permutations of capital to exploring the permutations of narrative. That is to say, more than just being about capital, Trust is also a (very meta) novel about narrative--and those two things are, in fact, inextricable. The structure of the novel--four sections, all told from different points of view--very clearly brings this thematic focus to bear. And Trust is such a cleverly structured story: its narrative asks some patience of you, but by its end rewards you tenfold for that patience. What started out as a somewhat slow-moving and dispassionate novel for me ended up being an absolutely fascinating and, in many ways, enthralling read precisely because it started out in that very deliberately slow, measured way from the outset. I love when literary fiction novels keep me on my toes, and Trust did that and then some. It went in directions I never expected it to go, and more than just being surprising, those little twists and turns made the novel so much more thematically rich and complex in the end.

Much in the same way that capital is always subject to these "mediations"--equities, bonds, land, etc.--Trust also gives us narratives about this famous financier character that are mediated by different authors and genres: a novel, a memoir, a journal. And the more you try to put your finger on what kind of person this man is, the harder it becomes to define him; accounts of his character are always shifting, transmuting across the book's many narratives and genres. Language, of course, plays a critical role in how these narratives work--in fact, what I loved so much about Diaz's exploration of narrative is how carefully he pays attention to language in his writing, specifically the parallels between the personal and the financial. The novel is called "Trust" and its first section is called "Bonds"--the double meanings there fit right into what the novel is trying to do re: capital + narrative. But Trust takes this even further; it's also interested in asking questions about the relationship between the self and wealth: in what ways is the former caught up in the latter? And as much as the novel highlights how wealth is institutional--supported and perpetuated by all the institutions that work in one's favour because one happens to fall on the side of privilege--Trust is also interested in interrogating what it means on an individual level to accrue these almost unfathomable amounts of wealth. What kind of person would you have to be to be able to do that? Where does the drive to make so much money come from, and, ultimately, where does it lead?

Finally, I want to mention the writing, because it's just pitch-perfect. (I highlighted so many passages, not just because they were interesting, but also because they were just beautifully written.) Trust is one of those rare novels that's so deftly and precisely written that not a single word feels out of place. You really feel like you're in such capable hands here because the writing is so measured, controlled in a way that makes it feel elegant rather than stiff. If the novel's structure--its different narrative genres--works well, it's because the narrative voice in each of its sections is so distinctive, adaptable not just to the genre in question (memoir, journal, etc.), but to the narrator who is giving us access to that narrative.

My review of Trust has, so far, been less about my opinion of the novel and more about its thematic layers. To me, though, those two things are equivalent: that is to say, I loved this book precisely because it was so thematically rich. Like Noor Naga's If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, it's a novel that I found remarkably thought-provoking, propulsive by virtue of the strength of its incredibly compelling commentary and structure. As with Naga's novel, I started Trust feeling a bit lukewarm about it--but then it won me over, and the fact that it did just made me love it that much more in the end.

Thanks so much to Picador for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!

A literary puzzle about money, power, and intimacy, Trust is a novel that challenges the myths shrouding wealth, and the fictions that often pass for history.Everything about this book is captivating. This novel is impossible to put down.

This is such a smart book, and smart in all kinds of ways. The central trope draws parallels between capitalism, especially financial instruments, and fiction - and those images and ideas proliferate throughout the book.

Along the way we have a central story that gets undermined, inverted and investigated through connected texts; we have assertions about the representation of gender in writing and the worn-out conventions that imprison women within certain comfortable roles; and we get a host of literary references and allusions from Henry James and Edith Wharton, to Woolf and Barrett Browning, to Plath ('a bell in a bell jar won't ring') and even Rebecca Solnit's [book:Men Explain Things to Me|18528190].

Diaz is especially concerned with American-based capitalism with the Wall Street setting and the accusation of wealth built upon slavery but the points transfer all to easily beyond the US. It's worth noting, too, the skill with which he captures the tones of the various texts that comprise the book: the nineteenth-century pastiche of the inset novel, the fragmented autobiography of a man determined to impose his own view on reality, the voice of a young female Italian-American from a lower class and anarchist family; the diary that finally gives a voice to the contested wife at the heart of the story who holds a secret - albeit, a ventriloquized voice, as they all are, written by a man.

For all the dizzying layers, this is a fast read with a page-turner appeal that lies alongside its more pressing ideas. Huge fun while also being serious in a core politicised way.

I LOVED the first chapter of this book, I was hooked on Benjamin and Helen's story. However, as the book progressed I found myself losing interest rapidly. While the writing was beautiful, it felt a little pretentious at times. And the multiple stories connected together didn't keep me interested, I found myself skimming certain sections and having to reread them just to understand what was happening. While I'm sure this is a stunning read for some, I found myself bored unfortunately.