Trust by Hernan Diaz

Published 2022 · 366 pages · 93,053 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

How hard is Trust to read?

Trust scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
Financial and literary vocabulary.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Four sections with distinct styles.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
Truth, capital, and narrative control.
Information density: 60 out of 100
Dense with financial and historical detail.
Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
Four contradictory versions.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
Trust, money, narrative carry weight.
Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
Diaz maintains metafictional distance.
Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
Truth remains contested.
Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
Four nested narratives.

How Trust is regarded

Trust holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Trust sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (164 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Trust scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic (undone toward Ironic)
In the end, he became a wealthy man playing the part of a wealthy man.
Symbol: Formal
Here is my Royal portable’s distinctive “e,” with its over-inked, blacked-out eye.
Mythos: Irony iv (irony iv)
Her face was a desolate ruin. A thing broken and abandoned, exhausted of being.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy + Confession
A diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies.

Where the story of Trust takes place

  • New York's Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, 1907-1938 (1907 to 1938), the main setting
  • Bevel family and Wall Street, 1807-1938, in the memoir (1807 to 1938)
  • Gilded Age to Depression New York and the Swiss sanatorium, in Bonds (1893 to 1933)
  • A Swiss sanatorium, 1929-1933 (1929 to 1933)
  • Swiss sanatorium at Bad Pfäfers, Mildred's diary (1933 to 1934)
  • Depression-era Brooklyn and Bevel's Fifth Avenue mansion, summer-autumn 1938
  • Bevel House museum library, c. 1985

5 things that are true of Trust, with the passage for each

  1. Helen Rask's convulsive therapy ends with her death and a broken collarbone.

    She said Mrs. Rask’s convulsions had been so violent she had broken her collarbone.

  2. Bevel plans to buy every copy of Vanner's novel and pulp them all.

    Because I will buy every single copy of every print run. And pulp them all.

  3. Mildred's engagement books record her founding of the League of Composers with a $10,000 sum.

    “LEAGUE OF COMPOSERS—FOUNDED—$10,000.”

  4. At dinner Bevel computes that fifty billion dollar bills would make ten round trips to the moon.

    If you lined up fifty billion dollar bills end to end, you could make ten trips to the moon.

  5. Mildred's diary says she deliberately created the ticker lags that made Andrew look clairvoyant.

    I decided to make these delays mine.

Scenes in Trust that Frye would name

32 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
Mrs. Rask’s heart, which had previously responded so well, had given in. Helen's sacrificial death after the third injection.
Pharmakos, untitled
Yet almost everyone found it convenient to have a scapegoat, and the eccentric semi-recluse fit the bill perfectly. Rask is blamed publicly for the 1929 crash he profited from.
Anagnorisis, untitled
That was my story. The retelling of detective novels over dinner. Ida recognises that Bevel is repeating her invented anecdote as his own memory.
Sparagmos, untitled
Her face was a desolate ruin. A thing broken and abandoned, exhausted of being. Helen's body and mind are shattered by the first injection.
Alazon, untitled
I am a financier in a city ruled by financiers. The memoir opens with Bevel's grandiose, boastful self-fashioning.
Confession, untitled
In more than one way I owe the fact that I am a writer to the Bevels Ida opens a sustained introspective autobiographical memoir.

Books that share these scenes with Trust

About the author

Hernan Diaz