HORSE by Geraldine Brooks (2022)
Just Read: TRUST BY Hernan Diaz (2023)
Review of Trust with SPOILERS. Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
I recently finished Trust, Hernan Diaz’s most recent novel and the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2023. I didn’t read anything about the book before I started it because I like to go into books blind and not be swayed by what others might have thought about them. This strategy might have been a mistake with Trust.
The book is best described as a literary puzzle with four distinct parts. As the title suggests, you have to have a certain amount of trust in Diaz that the format of the book is the best way to present the overall story. Diaz is clever in his choice of narratives, starting with a book-within-a-book, a novella by fictitious writer Harold Vanner called Bonds, then moving on to an incomplete autobiography, the true “story” of the story, and finally pages from a journal.
As a reader, you have to put all these pieces together before you can understand the whole story in a gestalt kind of way. With the various narrative formats, Diaz manipulates his readers, purposefully misleading them and planting false clues to the conclusion the book finally comes to.
The first part, the novella, tells about Benjamin Rask, a born millionaire turned billionaire during the 1920s; Helen, his wife; and Helen’s death. Bonds is a character sketch, or, rather, a dissection of a man, certainly well written, as you would expect from a Pulitzer winner. But it contains no dialogue, leaving you with a hundred pages or so of exposition. I admit to struggling through this first part. The novella breaks all kinds of rules for engaging a reader. I felt like an outsider to the book at this point, which may have been Diaz’s purpose.
I didn’t feel much more engaged in the second part of the book, which is a sketch of an autobiography by the “real” Benjamin Rask, Andrew Bevel. In Trust, Diaz shows us Bevel attempting to counter the narrative in Bonds by explaining his extraordinary accumulation of wealth and his relationship with his wife, Mildred. The arrogance of the fictional Rask is echoed in Bevel, who peppers his biography with convoluted explanations of his uncanny ability to manipulate the market and profit from it and with condescending tributes to Mildred. Again, Diaz purposefully distances the reader from the story by writing in fragments and note-to-self reminders, so it falls into place in little pieces. I had to continue to trust Diaz to lead me though his story, which is still all exposition.
The third part of the story is where the novel really comes to life and the puzzle of the novel Trust finally starts to come together. The point of view is that of a young woman, Ida Partenza, whom Bevel hires to transcribe his lectures about himself to create a narrative that upends the version of him and his wife portrayed in Bonds. Only through this point of view do you get a real picture of Bevel, his inordinate wealth, and his ability to alter reality through his wealth.
Partenza, a multi-faceted, intelligent, and relatable character, humanizes the story and finally gives insight into Bevel’s true personality, arrogance, and wealth. As Partenza continues to write for Bevel, she creates the character of Mildred, his wife, from her own experiences, since Bevel orders her to write his story that way. Mildred is a specter, a shadow of a person created by Bevel and Partenza. As a reader, you can feel Diaz manipulating your conception of Mildred and purposefully leaving pieces of the puzzle missing.
The last part of the book contains entries from the journal of Mildred Bevel. Here you discover that Bevel’s wealth grew exponentially because of Mildred’s intelligence, not his own. Mildred was forced to act through Bevel because, in the 1920s, she could not act for herself. In this section of the novel, everything the reader knows about Andrew and Mildred Bevel from the beginning of Trust is turned on its head. When the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place, the picture that appears refutes the picture that the first, second, and third parts of the book created.
So only by finishing the full novel can you see the true image of the story that Diaz is telling. The first two parts of the book morph as you read the third and fourth parts, and what you thought you knew becomes increasingly murky. The story in Trust coalesces only after it is over. My impression of the book changes the more I think about it.
I loved this book when I finished it, especially Diaz’s commentary on wealth, and I highly recommend it. But I gave it only four stars because three of the four parts of the book distanced me from the overall story. The first part, the novella, contains only exposition. The second part consists of notes for an autobiography. The last part contains entries in a journal. Only in the third part did I feel that I was reading a story. The disconnection was, I am certain, intentional by Diaz, but it made reading Trust difficult to read at times.
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