Trust
Ratings120
Average rating3.8
This is trying to be too clever. I get the concept of using multiple stories to strip back the truth, but this in places was just plain unreadable.
The first story is alluded to through the rest of the book as some literary masterpiece. It is instead a badly written piece of dry prose that is just plain boring. That conceit that this is a brilliant novel just does not work and undermines a lot of the story telling later.
The second of the stories is the most problematic one, written as an outline to a journal. The fact that it is just an outline means that it is incomplete and basically nonsensical in places. The stylistic choice was entirely unnecessary.
The third story is more readably but because it leans on the previous two it is ultimately undermined.
The final story is again a journal (although fortunately more complete in this case). The final reveal of the truth is moderately well done, but not enough to wash away the absolute drivel at the start of the book.
No way near as smart as it thinks it is
Loved the format and the “story within a story” - a rich investment in characters and the story being told in layers, was the hook. Hernan Diaz made it hard for you to have a reliable narrator, which is part of the hook of the book - however by the time you get to the “third book”, you're already in cruising mode, and if it did not have that third book - this would be a 5.
I wanted to rate this really highly, for the first half of the book is easily a 4.5 star read. I enjoyed the writing of Benjamin and Helen Rask, the story of their lives and the financial explanations. The 3rd quarter, where Andrew and Ida spoke lost me and I didn't love Mildred's diaries. I found the second half mismatched and patchy, difficult to get into. 3.5 rounded down.
Rounded up. While the sentences were strong and the characters of the two middle sections were mostly interesting, the structure of this novel bothered me. The whole first section, which purports to be a novel itself, while compelling by itself, isn't needed for the whole. The book, IMO, would have been stronger if this “libelous” fictional biography of Andrew Bevel and his wife had simply been referred to in the middle two sections, rather than present in its entirety. Likewise, the last section feels a bit like an epilogue, where a few questions were answered, but because the style was so different from the earlier parts, it fell flat for me. Even the second section, which tells much of the story from Bevel's point of view is problematic because of the choice to present it as if it were a draft of the final piece, which markings for where additional material is needed. As a whole, though, the book does paint a portrait of the crazy financial happenings of the 1920s, so I'm glad I read it.
Contains spoilers
I was hooked on the language real quick. The prose beautiful, but too dense to eat all at once. So I put it down, but unlike other set-asides I was compelled to come back to it every so often, to get through the parts that I somehow knew in my bones would end and that I would be rewarded. <3 And I was right.
That sounds too good; I wouldn't recommend this book on the strength of my experience.
I loved it, though. How Ida describes Vanner's book! A777777 yes that fits exactly! And then the- and the- ... Is this kind of like watching Tatiana play all the clones on Orphan Black?
Picked it up because it won the Pulitzer Prize. It's a little bit of a confusing setup with 4 parts (a novel within a novel, the main story itself, a memoir and finally some diary entries?) and the plot is interesting but at the same time I'm not really a fan of how it was structured.
Unaware of the Matryoshka doll-like conceit of the novel, I go in blind and find myself shaken by the second chapter with its jarring notes, “Brief paragraph Mildred, domestic delights. Home a solace during these happily frantic times.” The third novel realigns my approach to the preceding two (I especially love the flourish as Bevel recounts a complete fiction to Ida as if it actually happened) and all these are once again re-examined by the time I finish the book.
At least it is a clever take on what seems to be a glut of fiction this year that pokes at extravagantly moneyed douchebags existing within their own reality distortion bubbles, intent on manufacturing their own imagined legacies.
Worthy of all the accolades. The truth is slowly unravelled as different characters relate their experience, stripping away facade after facade.
Trust isn't a typical novel; it's broken up into 4 mini-books all told from a different perspective and with a different voice. The first one is the longest and written like a (kinda old-fashioned, tedious) biography of a 1920s financial titan. The next three tell that same financial titan's story from different perspectives, filling in a lot of color and calling into question a lot of the claims of the first mini-book.
I'd say the novel starts getting interesting once the 3rd mini-book starts revealing what's really going on in the first two books, and the 4th book provides some satisfying answers and closure to the story as a whole.
With that, I can't say I fully enjoyed reading Trust, however I have thought plenty about the novel since I finished it, both immediately after and as a talking-point to reference for a long while since. It's a great example of how all stories, like each of these mini-books, can be molded to make the truth fit whatever narrative its writer wants to tell (or is capable of telling from their limited, or self-centered, perspective).
By the end of the book you understand a lot more about what kind of person Benjamin Rask/Andrew Bevel really was, and how the people in his life were much different than the original biography (book 1), and Andrew's follow-up autobiography (book 2), suggest.
Tbh didn't finish it, I only read the first novella. But I liked that part enough for 3 stars.
Age range: 18+
No mature content (in the first novella), but I think younger readers would have a hard time getting through and enjoying the dense, history/economics textbook-style prose.