Book Club Guide

Trust

by Hernan Diaz · 2022 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Who controls the narrative of wealth — and what is erased
Multiple drafts of the same story — and what the accumulation reveals
Money, women and the authorship of American history

About this book

Four separate texts — a novel, a memoir, a manuscript and a diary — together tell the story of a 1920s New York financier and his wife, each contradicting or qualifying the others. Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks who controls the narrative of a life — and what is erased in the process.

Published in 2022, Trust won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, jointly with Demon Copperhead. Diaz spent six years on the novel, building the four-section architecture before writing a single page of prose.

Discussion questions

The novel's four sections each tell a version of the same story, each contradicting or revising the last. What does this accumulating structure achieve — and when do you feel most certain that you know what actually happened?
The most marginal figure — Mildred, the financier's wife — turns out to have been the most important. How does Diaz use this structural revelation — and what is he saying about who gets to be the subject of financial history?
The novel is partly about how wealth writes its own history. How does Diaz show this mechanism — and what specific techniques does he use to show the gap between the told story and the lived one?
Trust is formally very ambitious. Does the ambition serve the argument — or is there a risk that the architecture becomes more interesting than the human content it contains?
Trust won the Pulitzer Prize. What does it do that earns this recognition — and is it the novel's form or its content that is most significant?