Vocal Book Club: Trust by Hernan Diaz

In Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (published in English in 2014) we are reminded of how much fiction underpins our lives. Fiction, Harari argues, is one of the great engines of culture. Religion is a story many choose, collectively, to believe: it is the story that creates culture and cohesion. He uses the example of a brand — Peugeot — to enquire how we imbue fictions with significance. What connection can anyone now make between a company founded in the early 19th century with the car manufacturer of today? What does the “Peugeot” symbol on the front of an automobile signify? There’s one answer: a story. Perhaps you buy the car because, at some level, you believe the story.

One of the greatest fictions of all, of course, is money. I hand you some pieces of paper, or a piece of plastic, and in exchange you hand me… actual stuff. We all have to agree that the paper and the plastic have value, or the game’s up — as has been proven over and again, perhaps most notably in 1929 and in the Great Depression that followed. The pieces of paper can be dollars (pick your currency); they can be shares in a company. They depend on a story, and that we trust the storyteller.

Hernan Diaz’s novel, Trust, the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction, interrogates this idea in a brilliantly entertaining and effective way, constantly springing surprises on the reader so that we must continue to question why and how the tale is being told. Financial mogul Andrew Bevel hires a young woman from Brooklyn, Ida, to be his secretary and ghostwriter. Of his work moving markets he says: “My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake.”

But the book does not begin with Bevel’s story: it begins as the story of a Wall Street tycoon called Benjamin Rask; the reader might think this is the novel itself, but it’s a tale within a tale, for Rask’s life is a fiction from a novel called Bonds — based on Bevel’s life. Who to trust? Hernan Diaz’s novel is a sequence of these switchbacks and shifts in perspective, disorienting and cleverly constructed. The Pulitzer Prize jury called it “a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.”

I’m very much looking forward to the conversation around this intriguing novel. Here are some questions to get us started. As ever, thanks so much for being a part of the Vocal Book Club.

Trust Discussion Questions

Warning: if you haven’t read the book yet, you may find spoilers below in the questions.

1. Why do you think Hernan Diaz chose to tell his story from different perspectives in this way?
2. How did the changes in storytelling technique make you feel about the characters?
3. How did it make you as a reader reflect on how we “trust” the teller of any story?
4. What did Trust make you think about how we tell stories from history, and whose stories are eventually recorded and remembered?

These questions are only prompts, of course: join in the conversation any way you like and we'll meet you in the comments section below!

Upcoming Vocal Book Club Picks

FEBRUARY: Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths