Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader and always learning; sometimes substitute teaching, sometimes grandbabysitting, sometimes selling books

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz

It is difficult to write, for this book, a review that includes any kind of sweeping generalized summary, as a reader needs to experience it all as it unfolds to appreciate its layers and all that they share. This is a multi-genre, telling of financial industry history and the players who played, seemingly fictitiously but compellingly believable as well.

These characters’ interwoven stories and history over time is what makes the book all that it is. And it was a common theme to our book club discussion of it, recently, that many of us plan to go back and re-read it again for only knowing at the very end how some parts truly fit and wishing to re-connect things back to front again. I have long intended to make that my practice with some of the best books…but too often I finish the book, write the review, and close it…so eager to dig into the next, rather than read again the one I have just finished. For years I advocated students returning to the beginning once they had finished. In the best literature, the opening paragraph, even, or page of a book often foreshadows all that is to come from the entire work, ultimately, a fun thing for them to see play out. I have not, as often as I should, taken my own direction or advice.

In the case of Trust, the supremely valuable and multi-meaningful single word title is layers of impactful; the book is about “trust” as a financial industry term, as well as how one builds “it,” how one values a story and or can depend upon other persons’ perspectives and telling of story and/or history–or their interpretations–as well as what separates fact from fiction. I eagerly entertain a conversation with others about this single word–trust–and how it varyingly functions in the book, wishing to ponder and analyze how it plays into many aspects of the novel’s content, how it threads everything together but differently as well as similarly. If I were still teaching AP English Literature, I would relish the opportunity to discuss this with kids, as well as then challenge them to think of other words that are so multiplied in meaning, singularly, themselves singularly containing the layers we demand of the best literature.

There is no easy way to convey a list of meaningful or impactful characters in this book for that multi-genre, nearly Cloud Atlas-like conveyance, but it is easy to convey my fondness, most of all, for Ida Partenza and Mildred Bevel and their stories. I think you’ll find them to matter much when you meet them.

I wish to read this one again from cover to cover…and will. I first picked it up months ago, having put it on hold at the library due to its winning the Pulitzer Prize. When it came to me I only got halfway through before having to return it to the library. Then it became our book club selection, and I was thick into another thick book, finishing that only two days before book club met. So rather than returning to the beginning of Trust to start over, as I had intended and also knew I “should,” I was forced to pop in closer to where I’d left off, which was about halfway through, and still did not quite finish in time for book club. I had 20 pages remaining when we met.

And that could all make it sound like the book is not as wonderful as it is. It is deserving of the prize it won, and I am eager to read it all again.

And fully realizing I didn’t tell “you” much at all of what it is about, that is because as Janie said back in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, “You got ta go there to know there” and find your own way through its valuable layers of understanding.

Come back next Monday for another book review!