Book Review: Trust by Hernan Diaz
Every so often, a novel comes along that belongs on a money blog. Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of them. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (shared with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead), landed on Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022, and was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. It is also, at its core, a book about how fortunes are made and, more importantly, how the stories told about those fortunes become more powerful than the money itself.
This is the first fiction review on Winchell House. It earned its place: Trust is the rare novel that will change how you read financial news, founder biographies, and every “official story” of wealth you will ever encounter.
Book Summary
A note before we start: this review is spoiler-free. I will describe the structure and setup of Trust but not its revelations, which are the best part of reading it.
Set mostly in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, Trust tells the story of one marriage and one fortune, four times over. The novel is built from four separate texts, each with its own author, its own voice, and its own agenda.
First comes “Bonds,” a 1937 novel-within-the-novel by a writer named Harold Vanner, about a legendary Wall Street tycoon named Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen. In the world of the book, Bonds is a bestseller that everyone in New York has read, and it has fixed the public’s image of the Rasks permanently. Then comes “My Life,” the unfinished, dictated autobiography of a real-life tycoon named Andrew Bevel, who is furious about Vanner’s novel and determined to set the record straight. Third is “A Memoir, Remembered,” a look back by Ida Partenza, the young woman hired as Bevel’s ghostwriter, who watches the autobiography get written and starts noticing what is being left out. Finally there is “Futures,” a private diary that reframes everything that came before.
That is all you need to know going in. The pleasure of Trust is watching the same events get told and retold, each version correcting the last. It is a detective story where the mystery is the narrative itself.
Who is Hernan Diaz?
Hernan Diaz was born in Buenos Aires in 1973, raised in Sweden, and now lives in New York, where he holds a PhD and has taught at NYU. That multinational background shows up in the novel: Trust is written in four distinct English voices, from the Edith Wharton-esque polish of “Bonds” to the plainspoken immigrant voice of Ida Partenza, and Diaz handles each of them convincingly.
Trust is his second novel. His first, In the Distance (2017), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, so by the time Trust won it in 2023, Diaz was already one of the most decorated literary writers working in America. He has said in interviews that part of the book’s purpose was to challenge the cliches imposed on women, particular the assumption that women in stories about money are only ever victims. An HBO limited series adaptation is in development.
Themes in Trust
This is not an investing book, so do not come looking for stock tips. Trust earns its place on this site because it is a book about money in the deepest sense: about what money is, who it serves, and how its story gets told. A few themes stood out to me.
Fortunes are narratives. Money itself is a story we all agree to believe. A dollar bill has value because we trust the narrative behind it. Trust pushes that idea further: a tycoon’s reputation, the “official” account of how a fortune was built, the market’s confidence in a name. These are all narratives, and whoever controls the narrative controls the wealth. As an investor, I read this as a warning about every founder myth, every corporate biography, every confident explanation of why someone got rich. The story is the asset.
Question official financial narratives. In the novel, the “true” story keeps shifting depending on who is telling it and what they need you to believe. That is uncomfortably close to real life. Earnings calls, shareholder letters, financial media profiles, the memoir of the billionaire. Each is a “My Life,” written with an agenda. Diaz’s novel trains you to ask the investor’s question automatically: who wrote this, and what do they gain if I believe it?
Class is the invisible architecture. The novel is attentive to who gets a voice in the economy and who does not. The tycoon’s world of deals and speculation floats on top of labor that is barely mentioned in his own account of his life. Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian anarchist, sees the whole edifice from the outside, and her perspective quietly dismantles it. It is a useful reminder that the economy you read about in the financial press is the economy as seen from the top floor.
History and fiction bleed together. Diaz has said the novel invites readers to question the trust they place in historical texts. For investors, this lands hard: so much of what we “know” about markets is narrative built after the fact. The 1929 crash, the great fortunes, the legends of the traders who saw it coming. Trust is set against the 1929 crash and the Depression, and it treats the historical record the way a good short seller treats a balance sheet: with suspicion.
Criticisms of the Book
To be fair, Trust is not for everyone, and the criticisms are worth hearing. The most common one is that the puzzle-box structure can feel cold or cerebral. The first section, “Bonds,” is written in the voice of a 1930s novel, deliberately, and some readers find it emotionally distant before the book opens up. If you need to love a character early to keep reading, the first hundred pages may test you.
Related to that: the book is an intellectual pleasure more than an emotional one, at least at first. It rewards readers who enjoy assembling a mystery from documents. Readers who want a straightforward story about people may find the machinery too visible.
Finally, the ending’s big reveal divides readers. Some find it electrifying, the moment the whole book snaps into focus. Others find it lands too neatly, or that the final section changes the book’s register so sharply it feels like a different novel. I fell into the first camp, but I understand the second.
Who is This Book For?
Trust is for readers who like their fiction smart and structural, in the vein of literary puzzles, and for anyone interested in the intersection of money and power. If you read the financial press with a skeptical eye, if you have ever wondered how much of a billionaire’s origin story is PR, this novel will feel like it was written for you.
It is also for investors who want to understand narrative as a market force. Markets run on stories: the story of a company, the story of an economy, the story of why prices are doing what they are doing. Trust is a masterclass in how stories get manufactured, and that is directly useful to anyone who puts money at risk based on what they read. If you enjoy books about the psychology of money, our list of 7 Best Books on the Psychology of Money is a good companion shelf.
It is probably not for readers who want plot-driven page-turners from page one, and if you dislike books that make you work, the four-voice structure will frustrate you.
Final Thoughts
Trust is the best novel about money I have read in years, and it is not close. It takes the central insight of value investing, that price and story are different things, and turns it into literature. The fortune in the book is real, but every account of it is constructed, and Diaz never lets you forget the difference.
As the site’s first fiction review, it sets a high bar. Trust will not teach you how to pick stocks. It will teach you something rarer: how to read the stories that move markets, and how to ask who benefits when you believe them. For an investor, that is worth more than another book of tips.
#Books #Fiction #HernanDiaz #PulitzerPrize #Trust #Wealth
