Review of Trust by Hernan Diaz

This story-within-a-story-within-a-story reveals a clever woman working within the 1920s confines of her sex to outsmart Wall Street while retaining a conscience while showcasing foolish, greedy men determined to manipulate the truth in order to paint themselves in a better light. I was intrigued by the structure and by the peeks behind the curtains of a wealthy family and one woman's financial acumen.

“My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake.”

In 1920s New York, Benjamin Rask is a ruthless, outrageously successful Wall Street tycoon, and his beloved wife Helen is the daughter of quirky intellectual aristocrats. They have exceeded any imaginable measure of success and wealth, and their elite financial position and power has in turn catapulted them to the peaks of social status.

But dark secrets lie behind their intriguing success. Diaz's novel explores multiple versions of the couple's story through various points of view, which together present fascinating questions about the true story of two disparate personalities, their marriage, and their intertwined success.

The structure of the novel is intriguing; through shifting perspectives and increasingly occluded reality, the reader must choose a narrative to believe. Characters come off as less realistic than their fictionalized versions (who are main protagonists of the story inside a story), and the ability of those with money and power to manipulate the truth into pure fiction is chilling--and chillingly familiar these days.

A character's deep desire to avoid any perception of weakness leads to repeated outright falsifications of facts (facts that are, by the way, often more interesting and potentially bolstering to a powerful persona than the elaborately imagined fiction). The desire to rewrite history in this way reveals a silly, petulant wealthy main character who is easy to dislike.

Throughout the book, brilliant women consistently must work against chauvinism and prejudice in order to see through their projects, to improve the world, and to reveal the truth.

The peeks into the financial world of 1920s New York City was intriguing--particularly since the unorthodox approach to benefiting from it was driven by a genius of a woman (who had to work though her far less clever husband to achieve her ends). Strikingly, she is able to retain her conscience, while he loses any he once had.

More about Hernan Diaz

Hernan Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Trust. He is also the author of In the Distance.