Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Herman Diaz's 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Trust" absorbed me from beginning to end. For several days, I was captivated -- couldn't wait to get to it. This is a rarity for me. "Trust" is largely set in the financial district of New York City in the years surrounding the Great Depression.Here is a bare-bones summary of the story. The main character is a financier and trader, Andrew Bevel, the latest, and last, of a line of traders in his family. The reclusive Bevel amasses a large fortune during the 1920s and also manages to make money during the early stages of the Depression. Bevel's wife, Mildred, is the daughter of another New York State family with wealth and with intellectual interests. While Bevel concentrates on making his fortune, Mildred promotes educational, artistic, and cultural endeavors, particularly the development of 20th Century classical music. When Mildred dies in a Swiss sanatorium, in the 1930s, Bevel carries on but is somewhat less successful than in the days with his wife. After Bevel's death and lengthy wrangling over his estate, his palatial New York City home is turned into a museum.As is pointed out through "Trust", American literature has many works about New York City, the wealthy classes, the financial markets, and the nature of capitalism. This novel brings to it subject a strong sense of perspectivism. Bevel's story is told in four voices by four individuals, each with their own distinct voice and background. Each story has commonalities, but each is also different in terms of what happened and in terms of human relationships. The reader is left to think through the stories to come to an understanding of events and people. Showing and considering different points of view is integral to the humanities, whether history, literature, or philosophy, and to this novel. "Trust" considers city life, capitalism and greed, the arts, marriage, the relationship between imagination and realism, and more within its complex structure. It is challenging and mostly effective.Each of the four storytellers are fascinating both as writers and as themselves. The first, Harold Vanner, was a minor novelist of the day who wrote a heavily fictionalized novella about the Bevels titled "Bonds". It was fascinating to get hints about Vanner through the book and to read his account. The second part, "My Life" was written by Andrew Bevel himself, with help, and tells his story from his perspective and to rebut Vanner's book.The third and longest story is "A Memoir, Remembered" by Ida Partenza. She tells her tale from the standpoint of a 70 year old successful author. Partenza had been raised in poverty in Brooklyn by her father, an anarchist. At the age of 23, Bevel had hired her to help write his Autobiography. Partenza discusses her life with her father, how she came to be hired by Bevel, and how she became fascinated by the writing project and shaped it to her own as well as to Bevel's ends. The final section of the book, "Futures" consists of diary entries by Midred during her time in the Swiss sanatorium just before her death. Midred has a different perspective on the story and on her relationship with Bevel than do the other three storytellers.The reader will be encouraged to think about the world of financial trusts and about whom to trust among the four narrators, with their differing aims and perspectives. In his "Phaedrus", Plato has Socrates say that the written word can be revealing but also narrowing in its fixity.With the many earlier literary antecedents to Diaz's novel, I was reminded most of "Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer" by Steven Millhauser which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Martin Dressler is an American entrepreneur who, unlike Bevel was born to modest means. Dressler reaches the American dream of riches in New York City by founding a series of hotels before his businesses and his personal life come crashing down on his head. The story is a mix of realism and surrealism which captured something of the themes and locations of "Trust" in its own way. Unfortunately "Martin Dressler" has fallen into neglect. It deserves to be read both in it own right and as another voice on the themes of "Trust"."Trust" is a challenging, provocative novel about an aspect of the American dream and the American experience.Robin Friedman

Trust is an unusual story told in three parts with different voices and narratives and characters. At the end of the first part there were notes as if this story was incomplete and just being developed. I found this strange. The story told of a husband and wife who were affluent in society but not social. They kept to themselves as the husband worked the stock market to accrue more wealth as his wife was a lover of music and philanthropy. Their marriage was an odd partnership with each doing what they loved to do without disturbing the other one and passing like ships in the night occasionally.I moved on to the next part and it began with a chapter one again, making it even weirder. I did not know what to make of this Pulitzer Prize winning book. I have to admit I did not want to continue since I was not sure of what I was reading. It didn’t quite come together yet.The second part was told by a man who was a prominent, affluent man who was all about making money in the stock market and how upset he was over a book that was written about his wife and him. He wanted to do all he could to stop the printing and selling of this egregious book.The third part was another voice - the voice of a woman who became this prominent man’s secretary. He hired her to write his memoirs and correct what the other book had misconstrued about his life and that of his wife’s.I found this book to be tedious at times with all the confusion that set in going from one voice to another. The writing differed greatly from each narrative. I could not give it five stars even if it was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has gotten to my review that this book consists of the story of a financially powerful couple told from four perspectives. If you didn't know that, you would figure it out a few pages into the second version of the story. If you're particularly surprised by the fourth and final story, then you should reread the title of the book, which might be retitled "Always Mistrust." Mr. Diaz is a good enough writer that I don't begrudge myself the time spent reading the book, but I found nothing lyrical or passionately revealing or inspiring or innovative in his style. He's an okay storyteller, with characters I guess you can try earnestly to care about enough to deeply engage. Ultimately, I didn't come close to succeeding in that. The fourth version of the story is--by my estimation--the one that is supposed to produce the OMG-response, but I already knew something was coming and that it was going to reshape my view of the central characters and of everything I read before. To miss that going into that last section would be to ignore the previous three versions of the tale. And then, early in that final "diary" section, when we learn of previously trivialized mathematical skills and are given more to chew on about things like musical appreciation with a little Music 101 philosophizing (D F# E A -> A E F# D), it's pretty easy to guess what's coming. That's okay (except to the extent that the diarist sneers at predictability as a mark of lesser minds).It's the way the great reveal happens that bothers me and makes me feel that this is a failed novel. In a diary that is terse, minimalist, merely suggestive, the diarist stops in a couple places to ham-handedly tell OMG counterstory (the one, I assume, most readers decide upon closing the book for the last time to TRUST, given its location in the text and the satisfaction that the final gotcha-putdown of an unsympathetic protagonist provides).The diarist claims that the jarringly different passages that explain exactly what what REALLY happened (in careful expository detail) gives her some relief from pain and discomfort, but it came across to me as a plot device that the author failed to pull off. If you're going to just explain the OMG to me this way, then I'd prefer you stick it in a final explanatory section (Section V: Guess What!) written by an all-knowing author-god-voice. Don't give me: "AM Ouch my back hurts PM Morph AM Powerpoint slide #1: my actual talents, part 1...(a)...slide #2: my pitiful spouse's inadequacies...(a)..."One thing that diary section succeeded in doing was to swap out my feelings about the two central characters. The one who had seemed cold and insensitive gained a sliver of humanity and a quarter teaspoon of sympathy from me. The diarist, who rejoiced in bragging about personal superiority and absolute condescension toward a befuddled, largely incompetent other, lost any positive regard (already at very low simmer) that I had developed in the previous three versions of the story.Maybe that's the point. Don't trust anything you have just spent an entire book reading, including the final section. But if that's the take-away, why should wish to learn more about these people I was misled about? Surely, a good story should leave you with some appetite for more...for something truthier and give-a-damn-ier. These are people I never really cared about. Rather than becoming multidimensional by the retelling of the story, they were one-dimensional four times over. I don't like them (any of them, except maybe the champagne-toting butler: "Two glasses? Very good, sir."). I don't trust them. I feel no regret that they have disappeared into the dustbin of fictional time.