The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one anotherand in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz’s novel is compulsively readable, and despite taking place in the early 1900s, the plot reads like an indictment of the start of the twenty-first century with its obsession with obscure financial instruments and unhinged capital accumulation.

The final section delivers the journal entries of Mildred, Bevel’s wife, adding yet another facet to the stories-within-stories. The third piece presents the memoirs of Ida Partenze, a journalist turned accomplice to Bevel’s ambitions to ruin Vanner, who also seeks to undermine Bevel’s marriage. With great skill and using multiple voices, Diaz employs his inventive structure to offer intriguing insights into the hidden. The first is a novel written by Harold Vanner about the reluctant scion of a tobacco empire, Benjamin Rask, “an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover.” The second is a partial memoir written by Andrew Bevel, a New York financier with a clear resemblance to the character in Vanner’s novel, who seeks retribution for Vanner’s fictionalization of his life. Reading it is like standing atop a lighthouse as a fog slowly clears.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Diaz ( In the Distance, 2017), returns with a multilayered novel that pieces together a searing portrait of a New York financial elite during the early-twentieth-century world through four discrete documents.

Trust hernan diaz reviews