Trust

Trust is four documents that disagree about the same marriage. The first is a novel called Bonds, published in 1937, about a financier of uncanny instinct and his brilliant wife who dies insane. The second is an unfinished, self serving autobiography by the real financier the novel was based on, correcting it. The third is the memoir of the young woman he hired to ghostwrite that autobiography, decades later. The fourth is the wife's own diary.

Each version revises the one before, and the reader's understanding of who actually possessed the genius in that marriage turns over completely by the end.

The best of the four is the ghostwriter's. Ida Partenza is the daughter of an Italian anarchist typesetter in Brooklyn who despises everything her wages come from, and she is hired precisely because a young woman with no money can be told what to write. Her sections are where the novel stops being a formal exercise and starts to hurt.

Diaz is writing about capital and about who gets to author the record, and the two turn out to be the same subject: the man with the money commissions the version that survives. It is set against the 1929 crash and the fortunes made by those who saw it coming.

The first section is a deliberate pastiche and reads flat on purpose, which is where readers give up. Push through it. Once the second document begins contradicting the first, the book becomes extremely hard to put down. Best for readers who enjoyed Possession or anything built out of invented documents.