We learn that Rask is that rarest of creatures, a wealthy man without appetites. Morgan and Charles Schwab, men whose DNA was made of strands of ticker tape. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. The opening section is imagined as a novel-within-a novel, entitled Bonds, a 1937 best-seller about the rise of a Wall Street tycoon named Benjamin Rask. A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. Trust is all about money, particularly, the flimflam force of money in the stock market, and its potential, as a character says, "to bend and align reality" to its own purposes. That word "trust" in both their titles is a tip-off that that's exactly what we readers shouldn't do upon entering these slippery fictional worlds. Susan Choi's 2019 novel, Trust Exercise, about the misleading powers of art and memory, is one recent instance now, Diaz's Trust is another. But sometimes these metadramatic maneuvers serve a novel's larger themes. When a work of fiction reminds me that it is a work of fiction simply to show me how gullible I am, well, thanks, I knew that already. Take the opening section: You settle in, become absorbed in the story and, then, 100 pages or so later - Boom! - the novel lurches into another narrative that upends the truth of everything that came before. Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of those novels that's always pulling a fast one on a reader.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |