Review of TRUST

Gratefully wrong about an unorthodox novel ...

One of the best books of the year was possibly the least fun to read but the most memorable and instructive. I stayed away from Trust by Hernando Diaz ever since the tidal wave of positive reviews began to arrive, leaving a Pulitzer Prize in its wake. I told people that, after a couple brief reads, it felt stilted and contrived, written by an academic about a world he clearly knew little about - finance. Finally, listening to him in Sun Valley pretty much sealed the deal as his diction was littered with English Department buzz words guaranteed to kill the “buzz”. But, September arrived. A humbling month in general littered with the anxiety of travel led me to suspect I had protested too much. I bought it and after an initial growing pain of doubt and a midsection that began to wear thin, I admitted I had been VERY wrong. While almost too clever, it is a stunning treatment of the silence that surrounds history and how and by whom that silence is manipulated. It is a powerful piece of feminist literature written not as a polemic but as a puzzle that is only fully revealed at the end. The writing, the structure and the four narratives are the stuff of post-modernism. This is the world of Paul Auster, John Banville and Don DeLillo. The post modern novel lives on a razor’s edge, its cleverness and all too conscious artistry always lies inches away from turning a piece of writing art into a pretentious waste of time. So many of the post modern enthusiasts end up writing and sounding like the kind of “gits” that sap literature of its potential to create wonder and insight. The Sun Valley Writer’s Conference was about the intersection where the reader and the writer engage. That intersection in the post modern world is too often occupied by only the writer and his artistic conceit. Though Diaz flirts with this and his invitation to the intersection is a bit chilly, the subjects (both the characters and the themes) prevail

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