Literary Fiction
None (original 2022 edition)
Hernan Diaz builds his second novel like a hall of mirrors: four documents, each claiming to tell the truth about a financier who seemed to bend the markets to his will.
As the accounts contradict one another, the reader is quietly recruited as an investigator, asked to notice who is permitted to narrate a fortune and who is edited out of it. The pleasure here is structural and moral at once - Diaz is interested in how capital purchases not only influence but authorship, the power to decide what a life will be said to mean.
His prose shifts register with unnerving control, imitating the stately American novel before dismantling it. Readers drawn to fiction that rewards patience and re-reading will find a book that grows more intricate the longer they sit with it. It is a novel about money that is finally about language: who owns the story, and what that ownership conceals.
Measured, cerebral and formally daring, it lingers well beyond its final page.
The book
Trust is a novel built from four contrasting documents, a bestselling novel, an unfinished memoir, a ghostwriter's recollection and a private diary, each recounting the rise of a Wall Street financier and his wife in early twentieth-century New York.
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