What readers think of Trust, plus links to write your own review.

I read this book, and then I immediately read it again! It is so interesting and so well written! Each succeeding book within the book adds another layer of detail and understanding. The story itself is fascinating. The structure of the book is genius! The themes will have you thinking and talking for weeks!

“Trust” by Hernan Diaz is a lot. “Books within books” test your abilities, and you must reread a lot. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the work. You will feel more competent when you finish. The main character, Benjamin Rask, is wealthy and mysterious, earning a great deal on the market but remaining disdainful of excessive wealth.

The novel picks up when we learn about mental illness, solitude, and the 1929 stock market crash. Benjamin Rask navigates it so well that some of his peers hold him responsible. The part that the reader forgets is that you are reading a fictional novel about a fictional story, leaving you to doubt the reliability of the narrator and the “facts” that he presents.

When one “story” ends and another begins, the confusion doubles. You have to meet and absorb a lot of new characters, and you will not get the point right away, but the reveal is rewarding. Men in the business world will respond well to the financial aspects divulged and how they tie in with the familial strife presented by the author.

Since the novel spans a century, you will identify with some parts more than others. The third “novel” by Ida Partenza speaks of life as an Italian immigrant at the turn of the century, and I wanted more of that. For this reason, the book requires patience, but you have my word that it is worth it. A little knowledge of the stock market wouldn’t hurt, though.

Novels like “Trust” do not come around often because one could easily do them poorly. You have to do a great deal to keep the stories straight; your enjoyment will depend on how intriguing the story is. I found the presentation of contradicting facts interesting, but you had to re-learn everything.

When it comes to reading novels, who do you trust? I'm not sure I ever before thought about this question in such direct terms, but that's the underlying premise of this remarkable novel by Hernan Diaz, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Literature (shared with "Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver) and longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.

Set in the 1920s and 1930s in New York City, this is the story of (fictional) tycoon Andrew Bevel, a man who accomplished the most amazing financial feat: He beat the market just before October 1929, turning his stocks and bonds into cash weeks before the crash that led to the Great Depression. He spent his entire adult life beating the market, figuring out nuances and tricks to always come out on top—nuances and tricks that no one else could copy. But he is a cold, uncaring man who avoids society, has no real friends, and who is only made more human when he marries Mildred. This is not only a novel about Andrew Bevel's life and work, but also it's a novel about money—the ways it serves, benefits, and corrupts.

The book, which is described as a literary puzzle, is written in four distinct parts:
1. "Bonds," a novel by Harold Vanner that not only ruthlessly tells the story of Bevel and his wife (using different names), alleging that Bevel's wife went insane and he had a role in her death, but also reveals the secrets of how Bevel accumulated his money.

2. "My Life," the rough first draft of an unfinished and unpublished memoir by Andrew Bevel that sets the record straight after Vanner's hateful, hurtful, and fabricated novel.

3. In "A Memoir, Remembered," Ida Partenza, Bevel's private secretary who was the ghost writer for his memoir, writes her own memoir of that experience 50 years later.

4. "Futures," by Mildred Bevel, Andrew's wife, who finally gets to tell her side of the story after being maligned by Vanner and sugar-coated as a quiet aesthete by her husband. In this diary that she kept in the last weeks of her life she makes a big confession…one that would horrify her husband if it were ever made public.

Which one of these is the truth? Which one should the reader trust? All four pieces and parts have one thing in common: They focus on the meaning of family, the untold power and pain of extraordinary wealth, the moral devastation of greed, and the ultimate price of unfettered ambition.

This masterfully written book is highly imaginative and creative with a multilayered plot that I found riveting. But it's so much more than that as it expounds ever so stealthily on all the things money can do—from benefiting those who need it most to corrupting one's very soul.

And when it comes to telling our stories and reading about others, who is telling the truth? Is the truth the persona revealed to the public? Or is the truth the story only you can tell about yourself?

Who would you trust to tell your story?

TRUST is a really difficult book for me to review because I’m not sure that I understand it correctly. Here is what I know.

TRUST can be considered to be a novel written by Hernan Diaz. It consists of four stories: a novel written by the fictitious Harold Vanner, an autobiography (actually more fiction) written by the fictitious Andrew Bevel, a memoir (actually more fiction) written by the fictitious Ida Partenza, and a diary (again, more fiction) written by the fictitious Mildred Bevel. These stories make up the entirety of TRUST. They are not just stories within a story but, rather, stories that are the story. They are accompanied by no explanation but leave the reader to guess and not fully understand until almost the end. At least, I think I now understand, although maybe not fully.

I would say that Ida is the main character. You won’t know that until you are more than halfway through the book, though.

The novel BONDS is presented first because, you will later realize, this is the story that Ida reads first. It is the story of a filthy rich man who made out like a bandit during the Depression and is thought by some to have caused the Depression. You will later understand that BONDS is considered to be the real-life story of Andrew Bevel. The problem is, you are left to understand later too much. That makes for a frustrating read.

Next comes MY LIFE, the autobiography written by Andrew Bevel to correct the implications in BONDS. This is an unfinished manuscript. You will understand in the next story that MY LIFE is actually ghost written by Ida. And you won’t understand why it is unfinished until you read the next story. There are similarities between MY LIFE and BONDS, but you won’t be sure that the husband and wife in MY LIFE are the husband and wife in BONDS until you read the next story. I was still frustrated with a lot of unanswered questions.

Lots of questions are answered in the next story, A MEMOIR, REMEMBERED by Ida Partenza. Now Ida explains much of what I didn’t get.

FUTURES, Mildred Bevel’s diary, explains what Ida didn’t get but not until years and years later. Although Ida already understood that Mildred, not Andrew, was the main character in MY LIFE (and BONDS), she didn’t understand to what extent until she read FUTURES.

TRUST talks a lot about finances leading to the Great Depression. I found it frustrating more often than not. I’m still not sure what point Diaz was trying to make; he surely was trying to make a point.