Instead, we get a cartoonish setup, uninspiring characters, and an ending we all knew was coming.Įvery now and then, when I am lucky, I will come across a novel that will completely blast my readerly expectations from their mooring. This would have been far more interesting if the first sections presented compelling characters and a myth that readers could get behind, only to strip it away later. Showing that a wealthy financier isn't all he's cracked up to be is hardly revelatory. Andrew Bevel, the fictional character who is the subject of all this, is never sympathetic, even behind a façade, so we aren't surprised by later revelations. The first problem is that the faux novel is just plain silly, with bursts of melodrama and written in a deliberately stylized manner, like a bad Edith Wharton pastiche. It sounds great as a premise, but the book as written doesn't quite match the compelling setup. Each successive entry peels back a layer of the story to ultimately reveal the truth behind the original novel. The novel consists of four parts - a novel-within-a-novel, sketches of an autobiography, a memoir, and a journal.

Trust holds a lot of promise, but it just didn't work for me. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.Īt once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another-and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read.

Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth-all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perceptionĮven through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask.

Trust hernan diaz book review