Talk to Trust like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Trust is a novel in four parts, each of which tells a related story about a fabulously wealthy New York financier and his wife in the early twentieth century. The first section is a lush, Jamesian novella about a plutocrat named Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred. The second is an unfinished memoir by the real financier Benjamin Rask, furious at being fictionally depicted. The third is a memoir by Ida Partenza, a young Italian-American woman who served as Rask's ghostwriter. The fourth is a fragment of diary by Mildred herself. By the end, the reader has four different accounts of the same life and marriage, each one revising what came before.
The formal architecture is the novel's main argument: wealth buys narrative, and those with power over capital have power over how their lives are remembered. Rask commissions a memoir to correct the novel's unflattering portrait of his wife, then employs a ghostwriter to write it, which produces its own distortions. Mildred's diary fragment — the shortest section and the last to arrive — is the most unsettling because it's the voice the other three sections have been writing over.
What it gets right
- 1.
The four-part structure is not a gimmick: each section genuinely revises what came before, and the reader's trust in any single account deteriorates with each new perspective.
- 2.
Mildred — the wife — is the novel's real subject, but she appears only through other people's accounts until the final section. Her absence from her own story is Diaz's central point.
- 3.
Wealth in the novel functions as narrative control: the ability to fund your own biography, to correct the record, to ensure your version persists is inseparable from capital.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Hernan Diaz was born in Buenos Aires and raised in Stockholm before moving to the United States, where he has worked as a professor and writer. His debut novel In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2018. Trust, his second novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023 and the Booker Prize. He has taught at Columbia University and is known for fiction that engages with American history and the formal possibilities of the novel. Diaz brings a translator's sensitivity to language and a literary scholar's awareness of genre conventions to his fiction.
