Trust

 Trust by Hernan Diaz is a brilliantly written, multi-dimensional, Pulitzer Prize–winning, mystery novel. Told through four perspectives, the novel centers on a gilded-age financier and his reclusive wife. The degree to which he is responsible for various calamities, public and private, becomes an essential question. Driven by this riddle, Trust is a quick read, and a good one. Diaz is a talented writer. The multiple genres of this unspooling narrative are artful, funny, crystalline, humane, and often beautiful. There are many high points in the text, things I will think about for a while.

The best line comes from a dying character, after a visit from a  priest: "God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions." I think what she means is that, to an unbeliever, "God" provides a trite explanation of the ambiguous, the unknown, the eternal, the horrific. It's too easy, even lazy, to fall back on religion. Implied in this statement is the elevation of "interesting questions." And it's here that I part ways from Diaz. Because there are several interesting questions posed in the first half of Trust. There are questions of economy, of society, and of human agency in history. I love interesting questions in fiction. It's one of the great strengths of the form. But this novel actually answers them, or most of them anyway, in a late reveal. In some ways that feels satisfying, and it's probably why Trust is so popular and why I generally enjoyed the book. But on a deeper level I take Joan Didion's stance in The White Album: we tell stories because we feel the need to impose a narrative on our actual reality, which is just a "shifting phantasmagoria" of disparate images. The most accurate fiction acknowledges our inability to find the truth. Therefore, despite the artistic  enjoyment of well-crafted story, fundamentally I don't trust Trust.

Trouble Boys

 Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr is an exhaustive, and exhausting, account of a hard-living eighties band. I am just now getting into the Replacements, and reading this provided more than enough context for their music. Mehr is a clear and competent writer, and the book was long but went quickly: I read it in class alongside my freshmen. The Replacements almost made it big, and that brush with fame, thwarted by their drunken self-sabotage, provided enough tension to maintain reading momentum. The band members spent the entire 1980's inebriated. They never graduated high school, never got driver's licenses, never had a radio hit. What they did was rock. They flared up and burned out like a Neil Young cliché. I have become a big fan of their music, driven in part by a new reissue of Tim and Trouble Boys. While musically they have some limitations--it's not hard to see why mainstream radio didn't acquiesce to their humor and primitivity--they are very good on their own terms. By my reckoning, the Replacements are the best bar band of all time. 

My First Summer in the Sierra

 My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir is a chronicle of his time at a dream job--vaguely attached to a commercial sheep-herding outfit--in 1869. Muir is a celebrated conservationist and an underrated writer. His account is pure joy. It's inspiring and energizing and envy provoking. It's also a feat of word-smithery, to describe the same emotion in different ways, in daily journal entries, over four months. Only in September does he run out of new ways to describe the exultant beauty of the mountains. Along the way, his odes are interrupted by caprices of the wild: dramatic bear predation on the sheep herd, for example, and vertigo from the rim of Yosemite Falls that haunts him for several nights afterwards. Another time they run out of bread for more than two weeks and had to live on just mutton. These setbacks would break the spirit of most others, including his co-workers, but Muir redirects the narrative energy back to euphoria. Imagine the most positive Psalms, over and over, in an unbroken flood of gratitude and wonder.