Trust - Hernan Diaz
This is a reread. I first read Trust back in 2023 when it was longlisted for the Booker, and it went on to win the Pulitzer that same year, but somehow almost none of it stuck with me. I picked it back up because I've just started watching Succession and wanted something with a similar flavour of financiers and legacy and old money curdling into rot. Trust didn't really scratch that itch, as it turns out, but I'm very glad I went back to it anyway.
I'm not sure I can talk about this book without spoiling it, so consider this your warning if you haven't read it yet. What I will say up front is that I loved it and I recommend it without hesitation.
Trust is told in four parts, and each part corrects, or claims to correct, the one before it. It opens with a novel-within-the-novel about a financier and his wife, who falls ill and is shipped off to a Swiss sanatorium to die. The second part is an unfinished autobiography by a man called Andrew Beval, who we come to understand is the real person the first section's financier was based on. He's trying to set the record straight after that novel dragged his name and his wife's through the mud, but he's not a writer, and it shows. The manuscript is full of half-finished notes to himself, "expand this", "insert anecdote here", and by the end it's clear he never actually got there.
Those first two sections, despite making up roughly half the book, end up feeling a little like a prologue. The real meat of the novel is the third part, where we follow Ida, a woman hired by Beval to ghostwrite the autobiography he can't finish himself. She starts digging into his past, and into his wife's, trying to work out why the earlier novel offended him so badly that he had every copy pulped and tied its author into a contract that effectively ends his career. (We never get a clean answer to that, and that's one of the central puzzles in a novel that asks more questions than it answers.) And then the fourth part finally gives us Beval's wife, Mildred, through her own diaries, which you'd expect to be the section that sets everything straight. Instead it just opens up more questions.
It's a real puzzle box of a novel. There's a huge amount of reread potential packed into these four sections, because nobody in this book is telling you the truth, and the whole structure is built around that. The novelist in part one is, obviously, making things up, even if it's grounded in something real. Ida invents a new name and a new self to get the job in the first place, and is then given free rein to invent a voice for Beval because he can't find his own, and to invent parts of Mildred's life to shape her into whatever version suits him. Beval is fictionalising his own life because someone beat him to it and did a better job, and at one point he even repeats back a detail Ida made up about Mildred's childhood as though it's something that really happened. (Which it did, but to Ida, who stole from her own life when inventing Mildred. I could talk for hours about how that story about her memorising and reciting murder mysteries to her father and him pretending to attempt to solve them is basically the entire point of the novel but I won't). He can't tell fiction from truth in his own life any more, let alone on the page. And once you learn just how much power Mildred actually held, quite possibly the real architect of the whole fortune, you start to wonder how much of her own diary you can trust either.
By the time you reach Mildred's section you've had three hundred-odd pages of being trained not to believe a word anyone tells you, and then the book hands you a diary and more or less dares you to finally take something at face value.
I've spent the last hour or so reading around this book trying to work out how other people have talked about it, because it's a genuinely slippery thing to discuss, and I noticed nobody seemed to be picking up on a couple of details from Mildred's diary that I think are doing a lot of quiet work.
There's a small, throwaway moment where Mildred mentions reading Virginia Woolf's novel Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, written from the dog's point of view. She says something like: it's wonderful, even if the dog's perspective is inconsistent, which she finds distracting, and that the dog's loving submission to its bedridden mistress is wonderfully suffocating. I think she's describing her own marriage there, whether she means to or not. She's spent the whole book looking like the dutiful, submissive wife while actually being the one holding the whole enterprise up. And Flush itself is Woolf attempting to write a consciousness she has no access to, guessing at an inner life from scraps of biography and filling the rest in with invention, wobbling in and out of consistency because there's no way to keep something like that stable. Which is exactly what every layer of Trust is doing. The first novelist guesses at Beval from secondhand information, presumably filtered through Mildred. Ida constructs her own Beval from the glimpses she's allowed and her own version of Mildred from whatever she can dig up, plus whatever she's projecting from her own life. And in a very real sense Mildred constructs Beval too, since she's the one who gave him the raw material his whole fortune and legacy were built on.
The other thing that stuck with me is Mildred's fixation on church bells. She keeps coming back to this palindromic sequence of notes and wonders whether it's Big Ben, which points towards the Westminster Quarters, one of the most recognisable little arpeggios in Western music. She gives us the actual notes: D, F#, E, A, then reversed, A, E, F#, D. Except that's not the real Westminster Quarters, which actually run G#, F#, E, B.
Mildred is presented throughout the book as someone who lives and breathes music, who can identify a piece by ear without thinking. So why get this wrong? Is it just an error? Is it the cancer that's put her in that Swiss sanatorium starting to fog her mind? Or is it a deliberate little crack in the narrative, a wink telling you not to trust this section any more than the last three?
By the time you reach Mildred you've been primed by the whole structure of the book to expect her section to be the corrective, the source of truth that finally undercuts everything before it. And then you get there and realise she might be just as unreliable as everyone else. It's not that what she's telling you is wrong, exactly. It's that there is no true version of this story anywhere in the book. Every account, including her own diary, has been authored by someone with something to gain from how it reads.
I don't fully know how you're supposed to read this book, and I don't think I've worked it out even now, on a second go. I love how puzzling it is. I love that it refuses to hand you answers, and that every answer it does offer just opens up another question underneath it.
I don't have a tidy conclusion for this review, no broader point I'm building towards. I just think it's a fascinating novel and I had a lot to say about it.