Trust by Hernan Diaz

I mean this in the nicest way possible because I really enjoyed To Paradise and think that this is a perfectly acceptable and commendable comparison to make, but – for me (and, again, this is an opinion and is totally subjective (I’m nothing, I’m no one, I’m scum, I’m pond life, I’m lowest rung, I don’t matter)) – Trust is basically an entry-level To Paradise.

Split into four sections, Trust tells the story of a financier and his wife (or – spoiler alert – a financier and her husband ammaright???) operating at massive levels of success either side of the Wall Street Crash, the first part offering an in-universe novelisation of their lives from the perspective of a disenchanted novelist who they had previously patronised (as in “funded” rather than “spoken to like I was spoken to all of last weekend”); the second part the incomplete memoirs of the husband which he co-wrote with a young woman; the third part the memoirs of the ghostwriter (now in her 70s and a successful and acclaimed writer) reminiscing on her time working with the banker now that the family’s art collection and personal files have been released to the public decades after their deaths; and the fourth section – the shortest by a long way – comprising one notebook written by the long-dead woman that she had never intended or expected to be read by others.

What the reader gets, then, is four competing and contradictory versions of the truth, though the reader is expected to presume that we get closer and closer to the truth as the book goes on.

And don’t get me wrong, I did like it! I did enjoy it and I did read it quickly and pacily as it demands, but I did find the book’s level of success genuinely a little worrying: this is very much slightly experimental fiction by the book: this is The Affair (a TV show from ten years ago which tbf I enjoyed a lot, too), this is that Agatha Christie where the narrator was the murderer all along and just lying to the reader, this is The Golden Notebook (but without having as much to say – though tbf it’s hard to offer original commentary on the contemporary world while writing historical fiction (and also when you’re not Doris Lessing (and also when the world is stuck in a kinda sorta dead end where any real commentary about it is pointless and dead in the water as without total structural societal change on an economic, governmental and industrial level, there probably won’t be many people left in 40 years))), this is that book JJ Abrams wrote, this is-

I dunno, it’s not as complicated as it likes to think it is, and by having a “twist” at the end – that the woman was the financial/economic genius all along – it kinda trivialises its own premise and also makes it feel like a much more old school book than I think it was meant to…

I think the issue is that the author – and I do mean the author rather than the author’s four narrators – doesn’t quite understand (and I do use the word understand on purpose) the massive and genuine social harm done by our society’s current economic model; I think Diaz genuinely thinks that a bit of reform, a bit of government control and oversight is all that’s needed to make investment banking safe, responsible and suitable for society…

But that’s colossal bullshit and on a blunt level I think you need to be able to understand that to write a genuinely interesting and relevant book on the topic. If you engage with the banking system and don’t step away angry, you haven’t really engaged with the baking system or you don’t really see people as alive…

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Yes, it’s fine: some of the characters are well drawn, but none of the texts purporting to be from the 1920s and 30s feel remotely like they are – only the septuagenarian late 20th century New Yorker writer’s voice really feels of its fictional time, but even then language that feels very contemporary to now does slip in (e.g. “gaslighting” used very casually though perhaps I’m wrong and this was in common parlance of septuagenarian late 20th century New Yorker writers fifty years ago?) Certainly the “novel” of the first section feels like it was published last year rather than 90 years ago…

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Yeah, I dunno.

I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I felt it cheapened itself with its cod second wave feminism type twist (omg a womman good at banks!!! 🤯🤯🤯 “the doctor was his mother” etc etc) and I felt its movement away from the discussion of psychiatric treatments and shock therapy in the first section towards a much less literarily-fecund exploration of palliative care for terminal cancer felt like a literary dead end.

In fact, I suppose that’s it…

It’s not a mystery novel, it’s not a thriller, it’s a character study of a few characters and none of the characters, really, are that unfamiliar to anyone who’s read a lot of American novels… It’s derivative (but what isn’t?) and, yes, not as clever as people are saying it is, and it’s also far less damning of the financial industry than any responsible depiction of it should be, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun novel and a great holiday/beach read.

Don’t read it looking for something mind-blowing, but don’t necessarily not read it!!!