Introduction

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE
And named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The New Yorker, Vogue, Time, NPR, Oprah Daily, Esquire, BookPage, and more

“Buzzy and enthralling …A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery…Fun as hell to read.” —Oprah Daily

"A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ’20s and Great Depression."—Vanity Fair

“A riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed.” —Esquire

"Captivating."—NPR

"Exhilarating.” —New York Times

An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

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Discussion Questions

1. Trust is a novel that is told through four separate documents – a novel-within-the-novel, an unfinished manuscript, a memoir, and a diary. Why do you think the author chose to tell the larger story this way? How do the different sections speak to each other?

2. Each separate piece of the book offers a different character’s perspective on the same period, subjects, relationships, and events, revealing new truths and calling others into question. Which revelations surprised you most? Whose perspective and narrative did you most enjoy or value and why?

3. One of the major themes of Trust is power, who has it, how they got it, how they maintain it. Another theme is history, how it gets decided and shared, and who gets to tell the story. How do these two themes work together in the book? How do you think the different characters would describe their own power, or their own voice, and the relationship between the two?

4. Related to the theme of voice is the theme of visibility. Which characters are the most visible to the public and which are less seen? Why? What accounts for the differences in visibility? How does a given character’s public visibility affect the larger perception of history? How does Diaz encourage the reader to think about ideas of visibility in the book?

5. What do you think is the relationship between power and money? Can you have one without the other?

6. Did Trust make you think about the ways that history has traditionally been recorded, shaped, and remembered? Or about which people or elements get overlooked, or even erased?

7. Trust encourages the reader to consider the place of women and minorities in relation to institutions and narratives that seem to bolster the expansion of wealth in this country. Was this something you ever considered before? How do you see the importance of gender or race in the power-wealth dynamic today as compared to the time period of the novel?

8. Trust considers the reputation or aura surrounding one couple and seems to ask: what is fact and what is fabrication, and how can we ever know? Consider how this question, as it pertains to this one couple, can be extended to apply to much broader historical subjects. What do you think the author might be saying about the accuracy of our foundational narratives?

9. Diaz looks at the different ways in which capital distorts and shapes the reality around it. Consider classic novels you may have read from the literary canon, depicting affluence and class. How do they depict the place of women in the story of accumulation of wealth? How do they depict the role of immigrants? Were they written by men or women? When were they published?

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