{"id":9956,"date":"2023-08-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-21T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9956"},"modified":"2023-08-20T21:30:33","modified_gmt":"2023-08-21T01:30:33","slug":"trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/21\/trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Trust."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hernan Diaz shared this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust<\/em>, after his debut novel In the Distance<\/em> was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance <\/em>was a surprise honoree<\/a>, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a minor house. Trust <\/em>comes from a Penguin imprint and had much higher expectations coming in, and while it did win the big honor, it reads far more as a literary exercise than a compelling narrative or a coherent novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trust <\/em>comprises four parts, each of which tells part of the story of a very wealthy New York City couple between the two wars, the husband a financial wizard who profits handsomely from the 1929 crash, the wife a woman of taste who gets them involved in the arts and philanthropic works until illness overtakes her. Part one is a 1937 novella about the couple called Bonds<\/em>, a metafictional account of their lives that depicts her illness as a mental one and his demeanor as unfeeling and robotic. Part two is the half-finished memoir of the actual financier, his intended rebuttal to the best-selling novel that upended his life. Part three tells the story of Ida Partenza, the writer he hires to ghost-write that memoir. Part four is the diary of the wife, all fragments and contradictions. In each succeeding section, Diaz undoes what he did in the previous one(s), so that by the end it\u2019s unclear what\u2019s actually true, and the whole work feels like that aforementioned exercise, a way of undermining the reader by demonstrating the imprecision of memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the problem here is that the main character is the financier, and he\u2019s unsympathetic but also boring. He\u2019s not an anti-hero. He\u2019s not misunderstood, or tragic (even his widowhood fails to rise to that level). He\u2019s just kind of a jerk, and his wife\u2019s attempts to make him more of a human don\u2019t really pan out. Even finding out how much the novel may have wronged him doesn\u2019t make him a more interesting central character, and certainly the descriptions of the story from the ghostwriter\u2019s point of view paint him in a worse, if different, light. (I was all set to rip Diaz\u2019s bombastic insufferable prose when I reached the second section and realized that that was the prose of his fictional novelist.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was hard not to think of the similarly titled book Trust Exercise<\/a><\/em>, by Susan Choi, which explored similar thematic ground in a much more straightforward and readable fashion. (I was also reminded of it when I went to save this file on my laptop and the review for the earlier book popped up.) Choi\u2019s book delved into the unreliability of memory and the way other people can remember the same event in different ways because of memory discrepancies, perspectives, and prior lived experiences, and it did so in a way that also made you care about or at least invested in some of the characters. I haven\u2019t even named the main characters in Trust<\/em> because they don\u2019t matter enough. I didn\u2019t give a hoot about the husband, the wife, or really even the ghostwriter, because Diaz didn\u2019t give me reason to care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pulitzer committee never reveals much about its thinking, but its one sentence on Trust <\/em>referred toits \u201clinked narratives rendered in different literary styles,\u201d and that tells me this was writers responding to a feat of writing craft \u2013 which is, to be clear, a good reason to give a book a literary award. They likely weighed that more than the novel\u2019s lack of direction or what I at least found to be kind of a boring plot with poorly drawn characters. It\u2019s nowhere near the novel that its co-winner, Demon Copperhead<\/a><\/em>, is, perhaps choosing a higher level of difficulty \u2013 although Barbara Kingsolver didn\u2019t go easy on herself \u2013 without that other novel\u2019s compelling lead character or well-paced, intriguing plot. I\u2019d put it more towards the middle of the Pulitzer pack, certainly ahead of 2022\u2019s awful choice The Netanyahus<\/a> <\/em>or a good chunk of early winners that haven\u2019t aged well, but nowhere near the best that the Pulitzers have honored in recent years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hernan Diaz shared this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust, after his debut novel In the Distance was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance was a surprise honoree, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1343,36,1358,684,102,252],"class_list":["post-9956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-american-novels","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-disappointments","tag-pulitzer-prize","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9957,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9956\/revisions\/9957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}