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.