Trust

Trust is a 2022 novel by Hernán Díaz and a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Set mainly in New York City and concerned with the world of finance, it is a metafictional and fragmentary account of a secretive financier and his wife.

The book is composed of four fictional texts: a novel called Bonds, an incomplete autobiography called My Life, a completed memoir called A Memoir, Remembered, and a diary called Futures. Each focuses on many of the same characters, and the information in each is often mutually exclusive, so the reader is left to determine what is true rather than being given a key. The financier and his wife are the subjects of all four texts, and the versions disagree on matters of fact as well as of interpretation, so the reader has to weigh each account against the others.

Benjamin Rask is a prosperous American financier from a family of merchants turned financiers, and in middle age he meets the much younger Helen, a prodigy. The four-part structure is what the novel is remembered for, since it turns the financiers' habit of controlling the record into a formal device.