This historical fiction novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in twenty-twenty-three and has been described as a literary puzzle. To be completely honest, this book was gifted to me and I nearly didn’t finish it – twice.
Broken into four novellas of competing narratives, Trust asks its readers to decide for themselves what the truth is behind Wall Street tycoon Andrew Bevel’s rise to power. The first of four novellas, Bonds, lays out a fairly straight-forward, if at times boring, representation of the rise and fall of Bevel, or Benjamin Rask, as he is known in Bonds.
It follows the typical American Dream: a supposed self-made man builds an empire, but finds himself wanting a wife. Then soon after their marriage, his wife becomes ill and he will do anything to cure her, even if it leads to her death. And usually that’s where the story would end. But Hernan Diaz fractures that original, straight-forward story with three other perspectives of the same life.
Altogether, the novel is comprised of four competing narratives; first, the fictional novel, Bonds, then an unfinished autobiography, a memoir and finally unedited journal entries. Hernan Diaz effortlessly creates a collection of short stories that feel as if they are written by four distinct writers, proving exactly why he won the Pulitzer. As I said earlier, this novel was not easy for me to get through: The pacing in the first novella, Bonds, was too slow for my liking and drug out some historical facts that I found uninteresting. The second novella, Andrew Bevel’s unfinished autobiography, felt poorly written and I easily became distracted by the unfinished thoughts and over-inflated sense of self ever-present in this novel.
While I feel this was likely intentional on Diaz’s part, it nearly lost me as a reader. Had it not been a gift, this is where I would have put the book down. But I persisted – and I’m so glad I did. The third novella, a memoir written by the woman who ghost-wrote Bevel’s autobiography, was the first time in this novel I didn’t feel like I was counting down the pages. The novella follows her story as both his writer and a young woman navigating New York in the thirties and forties. As she reflects on her time with Bevel, she, and the reader, is forced to realize the lengths Andrew Bevel went to minimize his wife’s role in their life.
The final novella features a series of journal entries from Mildred Bevel, shortly before her death. This novella provides the most intriguing look into the lives of the Bevels and what role Mildred truly played in their success. Trust, in its entirety, is a wonderful experiment in perception, forcing the reader to examine how the person who holds the metaphoric microphone can influence the truth. And every time I thought I had a good handle on what the story must be a new piece of information would change my grasp of reality. This novel was extremely thought-provoking, and I can’t help but feel like the journey was worth the painstaking first half.
