Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (Large Print / Paperback)

Staff Reviews

Diaz takes the multi-POV novel to new places with Trust, which is told in 4 parts. In the first part, a novelist by the name of Vanner offers what is understood to be a thinly veiled roman à clef about Benjamin Rask, a fabulously wealthy and reclusive financier who manipulates markets to his own favor, in extremis, and whose wife goes mad in a Swiss sanatorium. Part two is an incomplete draft of the "real" financier Andrew Bevel's memoir. Part three is told by Ida, a young Italian-American woman hired by Bevel to fashion his story into a book for the "common reader," a counterpiece to Vanner's "libelous" account. The final section is the journals of Bevel's ailing wife. If four versions of the story are inadequate, Ida fashions a fifth in her section, a decoy version to throw off a mysterious and menacing man without a tie. As implied by the title, the reader is asked, "who do you trust?" The "trust" in the title also plays to the financial and socio-political themes of the novel: in whose trust are we? This is a puzzling novel, in the positive sense of the term. You'll be challenged and made to piece things together and, perhaps, rewarded.