Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

I read this book after seeing Dua Lipa’s interview with Hernan Diaz. The interview was dynamic, fun, complimentary, and insightful. The four-book structure and the motifs of money, high finance, non-credible narrators, and literary and historical intrigue seemed attractive to me. The book itself held my interest, in no small part because I wanted to understand it in a way that I could talk about it like I used to when I was in college. In an “educated“ way. And its structure and rich language kept me writing notes and looking up definitions, so I felt smarter, in the way that having a rich lexicon expands one’s ability to be conscious of more of the details in one’s everyday life. Around this same time, I am teaching students how to critique the credibility of online information, and wrestling with generative AI in my work as a technology teacher, and saw a cool little YouTube essay entitled “The Curtains are Just Blue,” in which the narrator preaches that we should be proud to be critical thinkers; that the current rise of anti-intellectualism in the United States is stupid (lol — they stated it much more clearly and convincingly); and that it is way better to overthink things than to underthink them. So here I am to say that I enjoyed diving into this book. I enjoyed engaging with it. It is a conscious choice to spend time and energy engaging with anything, especially in today’s world of infinite distractions. But engaging like this with a good book has been a favorite activity of mine for most of my life, and I feel the need to thank Dua Lipa for introducing it to me.

Warning -- there's a bit of a reveal here. This novel, written in 4 parts, requires patience to find out what it's about, and if one sticks with it to the end, the reader realizes that it has been worth it. Written in 4 parts that from the titles of each seemed to be unconnected, when I started, I had no idea just what was going on. Was this single novel in fact going to be a group of 4 different stories? The first part I found difficult going, the writing style stilted and dated, though the story was interesting in an odd way. And then I moved on to part 2 and began to see that there might be a connection, maybe, but it wasn't clear just what -- but the writing style changed dramatically. Part 3 again is different, now a far more accessible writing style, and this is where we learn the tie between parts 1 and 3. The novel finishes with part 4, which in a way is a sort of epilogue, with a major twist on the truth of parts 1-3. Ultimately, when all the parts are integrated by the reader, this is a powerful book about the worlds of wealth in NY in the early 20th century, but more about personal relationships, ego, and self-deception. Well worth reading.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has gotten to my review that this book consists of the story of a financially powerful couple told from four perspectives. If you didn't know that, you would figure it out a few pages into the second version of the story. If you're particularly surprised by the fourth and final story, then you should reread the title of the book, which might be retitled "Always Mistrust." Mr. Diaz is a good enough writer that I don't begrudge myself the time spent reading the book, but I found nothing lyrical or passionately revealing or inspiring or innovative in his style. He's an okay storyteller, with characters I guess you can try earnestly to care about enough to deeply engage. Ultimately, I didn't come close to succeeding in that. The fourth version of the story is--by my estimation--the one that is supposed to produce the OMG-response, but I already knew something was coming and that it was going to reshape my view of the central characters and of everything I read before. To miss that going into that last section would be to ignore the previous three versions of the tale. And then, early in that final "diary" section, when we learn of previously trivialized mathematical skills and are given more to chew on about things like musical appreciation with a little Music 101 philosophizing (D F# E A -> A E F# D), it's pretty easy to guess what's coming. That's okay (except to the extent that the diarist sneers at predictability as a mark of lesser minds). It's the way the great reveal happens that bothers me and makes me feel that this is a failed novel. In a diary that is terse, minimalist, merely suggestive, the diarist stops in a couple places to ham-handedly tell OMG counterstory (the one, I assume, most readers decide upon closing the book for the last time to TRUST, given its location in the text and the satisfaction that the final gotcha-putdown of an unsympathetic protagonist provides). The diarist claims that the jarringly different passages that explain exactly what what REALLY happened (in careful expository detail) gives her some relief from pain and discomfort, but it came across to me as a plot device that the author failed to pull off. If you're going to just explain the OMG to me this way, then I'd prefer you stick it in a final explanatory section (Section V: Guess What!) written by an all-knowing author-god-voice. Don't give me: "AM Ouch my back hurts PM Morph AM Powerpoint slide #1: my actual talents, part 1...(a)...slide #2: my pitiful spouse's inadequacies...(a)..." One thing that diary section succeeded in doing was to swap out my feelings about the two central characters. The one who had seemed cold and insensitive gained a sliver of humanity and a quarter teaspoon of sympathy from me. The diarist, who rejoiced in bragging about personal superiority and absolute condescension toward a befuddled, largely incompetent other, lost any positive regard (already at very low simmer) that I had developed in the previous three versions of the story. Maybe that's the point. Don't trust anything you have just spent an entire book reading, including the final section. But if that's the take-away, why should wish to learn more about these people I was misled about? Surely, a good story should leave you with some appetite for more...for something truthier and give-a-damn-ier. These are people I never really cared about. Rather than becoming multidimensional by the retelling of the story, they were one-dimensional four times over. I don't like them (any of them, except maybe the champagne-toting butler: "Two glasses? Very good, sir."). I don't trust them. I feel no regret that they have disappeared into the dustbin of fictional time.

During the April matinée, book club members gathered to discuss Trust by Hernan Diaz, the winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. What drew the most attention was the novel’s structure. Some oenophiles found the early chapters slow, repetitious, and boring. For me, however, the book truly came alive when the narrative shifted to Ida Partenza’s story. And I found myself entirely captivated once Mildred’s journal began to ramble and resist legibility. In the spirit of Rashomon, Diaz pushes readers into a rabbit hole of ambiguity and encourages them to accept that no single account can capture the full truth. The novel becomes a layered meditation on wealth, division, authorship, power, and the erasure of women and the working class in the official narratives of financial empires. After reading it, the multiplicity of voices lingers, as do the silences surrounding gender, historical truth, moral compromise, and the fading or erasure of the history of immigrant working-class anarchists like Ida's father. His name remained anonymous - a thorough erasure. The novel gains narrative momentum when it turns to the story of Ida Partenza, the young ghostwriter, and her loving father, an aging, anonymous Italian anarchist. Ida’s father embodies a strain of early 20th-century radicalism, evoking real-life revolutionaries such as Errico Malatesta, Luigi Galleani, Carlo Tresca, and Nicola Sacco. His fierce idealism and scorn for compromise sharply contrast with the opulence and cunning of Andrew Bevel’s world—a world of polite robberies cloaked in legitimacy. Readers would not fail to notice the fault line of the ideological divide that Ida must navigate both emotionally and intellectually. Mildred, depicted under the alias Helen Rask (née Helen Brevoort), is rendered with confusion. The only thing we must note is that her private reading list included Transcendentalists like Thoreau, satirists such as Swift, and aphorists like Nietzsche and Karl Kraus—figures who emphasize personal moral clarity over public acclaim. In a world defined by acquisition and spectacle, her alignment with self-esteem and inward freedom marks her both as otherworldly and fatally out of place. Andrew Bevel, the self-styled titan of finance, appears allegedly modeled after Andrew William Mellon - a banker, industrialist, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Mellon Bank, a major outlet in transaction processing, provides a plausible historical analogue. Though Diaz offers Andrew a cool indictment of the myth of the financial genius, the story gradually dismantles the machinery that props up Bevel’s legend. It portrays him as both a powerful man and as a curator of his own myth—a myth built on silence, omission, and borrowed insight. The book offers a vivid portrait of the leisure class—their vicarious consumption, conspicuous charity, and their obsessive pursuit of cultural legitimacy. The nouveau riche of the Gilded Age didn’t merely donate books—they built entire libraries. They didn’t attend concerts—they hosted them in their drawing rooms. The creation of the Metropolitan Opera House itself stemmed from exclusion, a riposte to the Academy’s refusal to grant box seats to parvenu, the upstart millionaires, hilariously depicted in the HBO drama series: The Gilded Age. Amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression, while most Americans suffered unimaginable hardship, a few—Jesse Livermore, Floyd Odlum, Joseph Kennedy—turned catastrophe into windfall by shorting the market. These figures serve as silent reminders that Pluto's wealth is rarely innocent. It accumulates not only during booms, but in the wreckage of collapse—when the world burns and opportunists strike. Mildred’s invisible contribution to her husband’s empire is reminiscent of Emily Roebling, who took over the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband fell ill. Like Roebling, Mildred was the intellectual and strategic force behind the scenes. Yet her influence is effaced, her agency denied. This gendered erasure reflects the broader reality of finance, where women were virtually absent from the upper echelons of investment banking until the 1980s. One can't help but wonder why so many intelligent, beautiful women in literature are doomed to die young. From Millie in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove to Mildred Bevel in Trust, their deaths feel less like narrative resolution and more like aesthetic sacrifice—tragedies designed to ennoble the male protagonist or deepen the story’s moral tone. While high maternal mortality rates (MMR in short) might offer a partial historical explanation, we must consider other causes such as mental illness, tuberculosis, suicide, and possibly social isolation. We are not far from there. Postscript) The trusts, or investment trusts, in the 19th and early 20th centuries were investment partnerships, essentially like buy-out funds or hedge funds in the post-WWII banking parlance. They were vehicles designed not just to grow capital, but to concentrate influence, deflect scrutiny, and more often than not, rewrite the terms of risk.

It was a Good read although a bit confusing

Herman Diaz's 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Trust" absorbed me from beginning to end. For several days, I was captivated -- couldn't wait to get to it. This is a rarity for me. "Trust" is largely set in the financial district of New York City in the years surrounding the Great Depression. Here is a bare-bones summary of the story. The main character is a financier and trader, Andrew Bevel, the latest, and last, of a line of traders in his family. The reclusive Bevel amasses a large fortune during the 1920s and also manages to make money during the early stages of the Depression. Bevel's wife, Mildred, is the daughter of another New York State family with wealth and with intellectual interests. While Bevel concentrates on making his fortune, Mildred promotes educational, artistic, and cultural endeavors, particularly the development of 20th Century classical music. When Mildred dies in a Swiss sanatorium, in the 1930s, Bevel carries on but is somewhat less successful than in the days with his wife. After Bevel's death and lengthy wrangling over his estate, his palatial New York City home is turned into a museum. As is pointed out through "Trust", American literature has many works about New York City, the wealthy classes, the financial markets, and the nature of capitalism. This novel brings to it subject a strong sense of perspectivism. Bevel's story is told in four voices by four individuals, each with their own distinct voice and background. Each story has commonalities, but each is also different in terms of what happened and in terms of human relationships. The reader is left to think through the stories to come to an understanding of events and people. Showing and considering different points of view is integral to the humanities, whether history, literature, or philosophy, and to this novel. "Trust" considers city life, capitalism and greed, the arts, marriage, the relationship between imagination and realism, and more within its complex structure. It is challenging and mostly effective. Each of the four storytellers are fascinating both as writers and as themselves. The first, Harold Vanner, was a minor novelist of the day who wrote a heavily fictionalized novella about the Bevels titled "Bonds". It was fascinating to get hints about Vanner through the book and to read his account. The second part, "My Life" was written by Andrew Bevel himself, with help, and tells his story from his perspective and to rebut Vanner's book. The third and longest story is "A Memoir, Remembered" by Ida Partenza. She tells her tale from the standpoint of a 70 year old successful author. Partenza had been raised in poverty in Brooklyn by her father, an anarchist. At the age of 23, Bevel had hired her to help write his Autobiography. Partenza discusses her life with her father, how she came to be hired by Bevel, and how she became fascinated by the writing project and shaped it to her own as well as to Bevel's ends. The final section of the book, "Futures" consists of diary entries by Midred during her time in the Swiss sanatorium just before her death. Midred has a different perspective on the story and on her relationship with Bevel than do the other three storytellers. The reader will be encouraged to think about the world of financial trusts and about whom to trust among the four narrators, with their differing aims and perspectives. In his "Phaedrus", Plato has Socrates say that the written word can be revealing but also narrowing in its fixity. With the many earlier literary antecedents to Diaz's novel, I was reminded most of "Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer" by Steven Millhauser which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Martin Dressler is an American entrepreneur who, unlike Bevel was born to modest means. Dressler reaches the American dream of riches in New York City by founding a series of hotels before his businesses and his personal life come crashing down on his head. The story is a mix of realism and surrealism which captured something of the themes and locations of "Trust" in its own way. Unfortunately "Martin Dressler" has fallen into neglect. It deserves to be read both in it own right and as another voice on the themes of "Trust". "Trust" is a challenging, provocative novel about an aspect of the American dream and the American experience. Robin Friedman

A deliberately layered novel about power, money, narrative control, and truth. Trust stands out for how it’s written: four interconnected sections, each reframing the same story from a different angle, slowly revealing how reality is constructed — and manipulated. A masterpiece in writing. Not to be missed.

I had to laugh after I finished this and decided to check the reviews because I knew it would get battered about a bit. I caught on to the premise as soon as I started the second section and felt like I was reading Atlas Shrugged. I thought it was an easy read-most people will not-but my background is in business and psychology so both were tweaked all the way through. I found it to be much more, therefore, than most people did. I saw key words like “flappers”, no, not even, and references to capitalism that I feel miss the point about real capitalism. I am reading this for a small book club some friends and I started and they are all Ph.d’s, as I am I, so I had some trepidation about how my interpretations would stand up. They are smarter than I am:). I am going to read it a second time now that I have confirmed I was correct in what I was getting out of it!