Related Posts:
- Introduction & #1 All the King’s Men
- #2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & #3 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- #4 The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns
- #5 The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
- #6 The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton
- #7 Drowning Ruth by Cristina Schwarz
- #8 The Drowning People by Richard Mason
- #9 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- #10 All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
- #11 Babel by R.F. Kuang
Thanks to these two bloggers for sponsoring the annual Blog Discussion Challenge:
- Nicole at Feed your Fiction Addiction
- Shannon at It Starts at Midnight
Trust by Hernan Diaz
© 2022
Date read: 1/31/2023
The four-part structure was initially what drew me to Trust. By the time I got to this novel, I was used to novels divided into sections that presented either various points of view or various time periods. But Trust was different from other novels I’d read in that its four sections are each a distinct type of written material: (1) a novel, (2) an outline for a corporate, public-relations biography, (3) a personal memoir, and (4) a diary.
These are four different ways of looking at the same construct: the life of financier Andrew Bevel. But which is the correct way, the right way? Which version of the man’s life is true? In fact, they’re all true—but none tells the whole truth.
Trust therefore demonstrates the necessity of learning to tolerate ambiguity. The world is a complex place. Life is messy. There are often many answers to the same question. This novel warns us not to become complacent in our thinking, because there’s almost always yet another way to shine a light on any particular subject.
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
Though I didn’t love TRUST, I thought the book was brilliant.
Thanks for commenting, Anne. I thought the concept was brilliant, and I’m waiting to see another novelist try applying it to a subject other than finance.