Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

I read this book after seeing Dua Lipa’s interview with Hernan Diaz. The interview was dynamic, fun, complimentary, and insightful. The four-book structure and the motifs of money, high finance, non-credible narrators, and literary and historical intrigue seemed attractive to me.The book itself held my interest, in no small part because I wanted to understand it in a way that I could talk about it like I used to when I was in college. In an “educated“ way. And its structure and rich language kept me writing notes and looking up definitions, so I felt smarter, in the way that having a rich lexicon expands one’s ability to be conscious of more of the details in one’s everyday life.Around this same time, I am teaching students how to critique the credibility of online information, and wrestling with generative AI in my work as a technology teacher, and saw a cool little YouTube essay entitled “The Curtains are Just Blue,” in which the narrator preaches that we should be proud to be critical thinkers; that the current rise of anti-intellectualism in the United States is stupid (lol — they stated it much more clearly and convincingly); and that it is way better to overthink things than to underthink them.So here I am to say that I enjoyed diving into this book. I enjoyed engaging with it. It is a conscious choice to spend time and energy engaging with anything, especially in today’s world of infinite distractions. But engaging like this with a good book has been a favorite activity of mine for most of my life, and I feel the need to thank Dua Lipa for introducing it to me.

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.