Trust

Snapshot of the Book

for a prize winner! Trust won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction!

The novel is set in the early 20th century and divided into four parts, each revealing a completely different version of the "truth." Together, they trace the life of a wealthy industrialist named Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen, whose mysterious illness and death is initially attributed to a predisposition to madness.

In the first part, we read Bonds, a novel supposedly written by a Harold Vanner, which tells the story of Benjamin Rask. It focuses on his rise to fame as a shrewd financier, his marriage to Mildred, and her deterioration into madness.

Part two is made up of fragments of Andrew Bevel's half written autobiography. His aim with the autobiographical work was to correct and redress the errors of "Harold Vanner's" novel that has apparently grossly mischaracterized his family and, in particular, his wife Millie (what is now the "real" name of the woman called Mildred in the Vanner novel). Bevel believes the Vanner novel is a monstrous distortion of reality, because he never made money dishonourably in the 1929 crash, his wife was not crazy, her death was not suspicious.

And yet, in parts three, Diaz introduces a third narrator, Ida Partenza, who comes to work for Andrew Bevel in the 1930s as his ghost writer. It becomes clearer that the truth of the story isn't as it's been presented in the first two parts. The fourth and final section includes some of Helen's journal entries, in which we see pieces of the actual events from her point of view. These journal entries reveal a completely different story once more.

It is a masterful display of perspectivism: the view that all ideas take place from particular perspectives.