I love when literary fiction novels keep me on my toes, and Trust did that and then some.

And Trust is such a cleverly structured story: its narrative asks some patience of you, but by its end rewards you tenfold for that patience. What started out as a somewhat slow-moving and dispassionate novel for me ended up being an absolutely fascinating and, in many ways, enthralling read precisely because it started out in that very deliberately slow, measured way from the outset. That is to say, more than just being about capital, Trust is also a (very meta) novel about narrative–and those two things are, in fact, inextricable. The structure of the novel–four sections, all told from different points of view–very clearly brings this thematic focus to bear. It’s not a stretch, then, to go from exploring the permutations of capital to exploring the permutations of narrative. So the novel is interested in looking at the many permutations of capital: how one thing is transmuted into another, all these different “mediations” that can and do make capital seem so abstract for those at the top pulling its strings. It seemed that the virtually endless mediations that constitute a fortune–equities and bonds tied to corporations tied to land equipment and laboring multitudes, housed, fed, and clothed through the labor of yet other multitudes around the world, paid in different currencies with a value, also the object of trade and speculation, tied to the fate of different national economies tied, ultimately, to corporations tied tied to equities and bonds–had rendered immediate relationships irrelevant to him.” The further and deeper his investment extended into society, the more he withdrew into himself. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die.” It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. “He became fascinated by the contortions of money–how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. Here the novel plants the seeds of the ideas it’s going to explore in its next three sections, namely the kind of mutability that is inherent to capital and the way it operates. That’s where you get passages like these,

This is very much front and center in its first section, “Bonds,” where one of our two main leads is the hugely successful and nigh indomitable Wall Street financier, Benjamin Rask. Trust is a novel that is, at its most basic level, about capital. A modern classic in the making, Trust is one of the most fascinating novels I’ve read all year.

Trust by hernan diaz reviews