Diaz’s method is to juxtapose competing interpretations of the life of his character Andrew Bevel. Trust is a rich and prismatic-though ultimately anticlimactic-novel interested in the twin meanings of speculation, both the act of amassing wealth through the stock market and of creating stories to explain and define the past. It recognizes the human costs of a great fortune, even though its characters can see nothing beyond their own calculations they are most guilty when most innocent, most enthralled by the abstraction of money itself. For Trust always acknowledges the world that lies outside its own pages. The true circularity here lies in the workings of capital, in a monetary system so self-referential that it has forgotten what Diaz himself remembers. a strangely self-reflexive work: strangely, because unlike some metafictional exercises this book does more than chase its own tail. much of the novel’s pleasure derives from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises. It’s a disorienting but effective way to present a character who seems almost entirely without an inner life of his own, whose whole being lies in anticipating the clickety-click of a ticker tape. In both books, he reports on his characters’ inner lives instead of dramatizing them, and in Vanner’s hands especially, the result reads more like a biography than a novel: a narrative without dialogue, in which Rask’s life is given to us more often in summary than in scenes. Diaz relies in contrast on a far one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and dispassionate. Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person. Diaz’s own prose keeps an antiseptic distance of its own, no matter who his narrator might be.

intricate, cunning and consistently surprising.

Trust by diaz