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You can't 'trust' this novel. and that's a very good thing.

Maureen Corrigan

Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of those novels that's always pulling a fast one on a reader. Take the opening section: You settle in, become absorbed in the story and, then, 100 pages or so later — Boom! — the novel lurches into another narrative that upends the truth of everything that came before.

When a work of fiction reminds me that it is a work of fiction simply to show me how gullible I am, well, thanks, I knew that already. But sometimes these metadramatic maneuvers serve a novel's larger themes. Susan Choi's 2019 novel, Trust Exercise , about the misleading powers of art and memory, is one recent instance; now, Diaz's Trust is another. That word "trust" in both their titles is a tip-off that that's exactly what we readers shouldn't do upon entering these slippery fictional worlds.

Trust is all about money, particularly, the flimflam force of money in the stock market, and its potential, as a character says, "to bend and align reality" to its own purposes. The opening section is imagined as a novel-within-a novel, entitled Bonds , a 1937 best-seller about the rise of a Wall Street tycoon named Benjamin Rask. Think of figures like J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab, men whose DNA was made of strands of ticker tape. We learn that Rask is that rarest of creatures, a wealthy man without appetites. Our narrator tells us Rask is fascinated by only one thing:

If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. ... There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transactions affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion ...

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Hernan diaz's anticipated novel 'trust' probes the illusion of money — and the truth.

For the sake of posterity, Rask does eventually marry — an equally self-contained woman named Helen. Throughout the Roaring '20s, Rask accrues wealth and Helen finds her place as a patron of the arts. Then, comes the Crash of 1929.

Because Rask profits from other speculators' losses, rumors circulate that he rigged the Crash and he and Helen are ostracized. The final chapters of this saga detail Helen's ordeal as a patient at a psychiatric institute in Switzerland; her mania and her eczema, described as a "merciless red flat monster gnawing on her skin," are reminiscent of the real life torments of Zelda Fitzgerald.

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The opening section of Trust , as I've said, is so sharply realized, it's disorienting to begin the novel's next section, composed of notes on a story that sounds like the one we've just read. But, then, Diaz lures us readers into once again suspending our disbelief when we reach the captivating third section of his novel, which mostly takes place during the Great Depression. There, a young woman from Brooklyn named Ida Partenza becomes the secretary — and ghostwriter — for a financial mogul named Andrew Bevel.

Bevel's life is the source for that best-selling novel, Bonds , and he's so infuriated by that novel, he's had all copies removed from the New York public library system. Bevel hires Ida to help him write a memoir that will set the record straight. Sure. The fourth and final section of Trust is wired with booby traps, blowing the whole artifice up before our wide-open eyes.

Trust is an ingeniously constructed historical novel with a postmodern point. Throughout, Diaz makes a connection between the realms of fiction and finance. As Ida's father, an Italian anarchist, says:

Money is a fantastic commodity. You can't eat or wear money, but it represents all the food and clothes in the world. This is why it's a fiction. ... Stocks, shares, bonds. Do you think any of these things those bandits across the river buy and sell represent any real, concrete value? No. ... That's what all these criminals trade in: fictions.

Literary fiction, too, is a fantastic commodity in which our best writers become criminals of the imagination, stealing our attention and our very desires. Diaz, whose last novel, In the Distance , reworked the myths of masculine individualism in the American West, makes an artistic fortune in Trust . And we readers make out like bandits, too.

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Riverhead, 2022

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Hardeep sidhu, more online by hardeep sidhu.

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by Hernan Diaz

Reviewed by hardeep sidhu.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust , like his Pulitzer-finalist debut In the Distance (2017), is historical fiction that thrums with the energy of today’s crises. Diaz trains his eye on the wealthy New Yorkers of the Great Depression to tell a story of our time: capital’s inexorable march in the face of economic crisis. But Diaz avoids allegory in favor of enduring questions. Who holds wealth, and why? And how does capital—like a “living creature [ … ] following appetites of its own [ … ] trying to exercise its free will”—shape the stories we tell?

Trust revolves around a secretive wealthy couple, the Rasks. Benjamin has new money, Helen an old name. Their fortune grows in spite of—or perhaps because of—the 1929 stock market crash. An enraged public views Benjamin as “the hand behind the invisible hand.” The press depicts him as “a vampire, a vulture, or a pig.” Helen, insulated until now by her philanthropy, sees that “she would pay for the suffering that had helped make her husband rich beyond measure.” As the Rasks amass greater wealth, their private lives fall apart.

Stories about the Rasks proliferate, each of which Diaz captures through a kaleidoscopic structure. Trust consists of four sections: a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a private diary, each with its own author, audience, and agenda. The story unfolds in the interplay between these texts as much as within them.

I confess that the novel-within-a-novel conceit is a pet peeve of mine. All too often the embedded stories aren’t as good as their frames require them to be. But Bonds , the opening political novel-within-a-novel by the fictitious Harold Vanner, succeeds on its own terms before Diaz puts it to other uses. Matching the era’s writing, Vanner’s immersive novel evokes Edith Wharton’s perceptive eye and the muckrakers’ moral intensity. Finely sketched details accrete into compelling portraits. And the plot—a political fable about a capitalist’s hubris—builds steadily to a dramatic conclusion. And then Diaz starts the story over.

Like any good experimental novel, Trust —a clean, linear narrative until this point—shatters to fragments. And, as with any good detective novel, the reader must parse contradictory accounts, dodge red herrings, and hunt for clues to find the answers. For all his deep fascination with political economy, Diaz has written a well-paced, suspenseful novel. As readers, we end up trying to pin down the well-guarded secrets of society’s elite.

Subsequent sections reveal Benjamin and Helen Rask to be Andrew and Mildred Bevel, who write their own separate accounts to set the record straight. The novel’s longest section, and its heart, is a memoir by one Ida Partenza, a self-taught typist and daughter of an Italian anarchist, who comes to work for Andrew Bevel. Ida’s proletarian presence bursts the elite bubble we’ve only peered into until now. Soon, questions of complicity arise. Is there dignity in her work on behalf of capital? Or is her labor a betrayal in itself? The vivid meetings of Ida and Andrew remind me of Roberto Bolaño’s Father Urrutia, tasked with teaching Marxism to Pinochet. The power imbalances of a fractured society are embodied and dramatized in tense scenes. “‘Have your chowder,’” Andrew commands her during a fraught dinner conversation. “I had my chowder,” Ida recalls, without comment.

One of the novel’s preoccupations is misogyny, which cuts across political lines. Women hide their opinions from self-absorbed men. Such men, writes Ida, “all believed, without any sort of doubt, that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard.” The novel’s conservative men, of course, uphold the gender status quo. But the anti-capitalist and anarchist men of Trust , for all their critiques of self-interest and hierarchy, are complicit. Ida’s self-assured writing throws the gender politics of the novel into stark relief. And, in a bravura final section, Mildred Bevel—a fleeting, feminine presence in the men’s stories—finally has her say.

This intricate novel possesses a rare, fractal beauty: patterns first noticeable in the tiny twigs of its sentences recur in the branches of its sections and yet again in the shape of the whole. One character in Trust calls money a fiction. Finance capital, then, is “the fiction of a fiction.” And Trust , you might say, is the fiction of the fiction of a fiction, whose patterns extend well beyond its pages. Human lives rise and fall, but the greed of corporations and family fortunes persists. “Self-made” men trade on the stolen labor of women and the underclass. And the wealthy will stop at nothing—they will even “bend and align reality” itself—to tell their story in their own way. But, as Trust shows, theirs must not be the last word.

Published on August 9, 2022

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On the Shelf

By Hernan Diaz Riverhead: 426 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Andrew Bevel, the elusive Manhattan financier at the center of Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust ,” is all story, no substance. A 6-feet-tall stack of $100 bills dressed in a Savile Row suit, Bevel’s only notable trait is that he’s a schmuck.

Nonetheless, Bevel’s name is engraved in stone on New York institutions and pressed onto the front pages of newspapers. His whims flip the markets, demolish industries, control the livelihoods of every creature in this country. He claims in his autobiography, “My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few,” but that implies there is a life to know. As one character explains, “[H]e had no appetites to repress.”

Then again, that’s the point of him. The hollow core of the great man myth is Diaz’s recurring project. He specializes in plaster busts that look like marble only from a distance.

In his first novel, the nearly perfect “ In the Distance ,” Diaz created the un-Bevel in a mid-19th century Swedish immigrant named Håkan, a man of enormous physical stature and dejected humility who accidentally turns himself into a folk hero. History has tricked us into revering these men, Diaz suggests, so he will too. His new entry in that project, “Trust,” is a wily jackalope of a novel — tame but prickly, a different beast from every angle.

If you can keep this straight, “Trust” has four parts inside it: a novel within the novel followed by an autobiography in progress followed by a memoir and finally a primary source. The novel, “Bonds,” by a chap called Harold Vanner, is the tale of Benjamin and Helen Rask — thinly disguised stand-ins for Bevel and his wife, Mildred — early 20th century Manhattan bigwigs who grow richer and more reclusive in tandem until Helen dies, mad and logorrheic, in a Swiss sanatorium. Succès de scandale .

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The autobiography, “My Life,” is Bevel’s attempt at a refutation: Vanner, he insists, wrongly skewered him as the proximate cause of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and misrepresented his sweet, simple wife as a gilded-caged Bertha Mason . It’s less mea culpa , more me me me .

Just as Bevel’s autobiography retells the story of the novel, the memoir guts the autobiography like a still-wriggling fish. The author of “A Memoir, Remembered” is a striving first-generation Italian American woman named Ida Partenza (alias Ida Prentice, get it, apprentice ?) who seems to have the real truth in her grasp. Until that changes. I won’t reveal the contents of the final section; that would unravel Diaz’s careful cross-stitch. But let’s just say it too undoes what came before.

Readers either adore or abhor trickster novels. Think of how Ian McEwan’s “ Atonement ” and Susan Choi’s “ Trust Exercise ” evoke such vehement reactions depending on the reader’s tolerance for high jinks. Both, in my estimation, are hands-down successes: Their twists fulfill a compact with the reader.

Diaz, on the other hand, undercuts himself. I’m delighted that he messes with narrative: By all means, mash fiction into sludge and refire it into something new. But if everything is a ruse — and absolutely every bit of “Trust” betrays its title — the reveal has to live up to the subterfuge. Diaz’s revelation will wallop you with its obviousness. It’s a trick that women perfected in decades long gone.

I mean this, in a way, as a backward compliment: The disappointment is intense because the setup is so shrewd and the writing so immaculate. “Trust” mimics narrative conventions so masterfully that Diaz can smuggle in an entire story without attracting attention. As with “ Chicago’s ” slippery Billy Flynn, “You notice how his mouth never moves.”

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It starts with a literary honey trap: Vanner’s novel about the Rasks is the sort of faux-Whartonian confection that relies heavily on descriptions of polished wood and unpolished manners: snobbery and snubbery. Buttercream fiction — too rich in every way. I’m embarrassed to admit it checked all my boxes: hushed mansions, gilded cages and sanatorium scenes lifted right out of “The Magic Mountain.”

Bevel’s staid and self-deluded “My Life” (a Bill Clinton jab , one can only hope) follows every tired convention of the windy autobiographies of tycoons and other rich twits. It’s scoldy: “I hope my words will steel the reader against not only the regrettable conditions of our time but also against any form of coddling.” It’s also entirely belittling of his partner: Mildred is a “quiet, steady presence … placid moral example … like a sweetly mischievous child.” But it parcels out just enough facts divergent from “Bonds” — Helen Rask dies when her heart gives out after experimental “Convulsive Therapy,” Mildred Bevel of a cruel tumor — to invite more interest in Bevel, not less.

Ida’s memoir, set in 1938 and “written” in 1981, promises the clarity of a third party. More specifically, a female third party, unyoked from ego. In Italian, al punto di partenza means to come full circle, and Miss Partenza, with her insights into Bevel, tries to close the loop on his life. It’s no accident that her own story — raised by an anarchist father who, significantly, runs a printing press (every major character is devoted to the written word) — proves more alluring than a mogul’s. She is the kind of person — poor, self-taught, female — so often overshadowed by the great men of history. Bevel underestimates her, and Mildred, at his peril.

And in this house of blind spots, what is Diaz’s? He underestimates how many times we’ve seen this story before and how little it will surprise readers to discover that a woman is smarter and more complicated than men present her to be. We cannot keep locking madwomen in the attic just so we can free them to cheers and sighs of relief.

Diaz’s ending presumes to get at the root of something: “Trust” takes an obvious fiction and sheds more and more pretense as it goes along. It even begins with a bound and sold book and ends with a secret, illegible one, as if authenticity can flow only from the nib of a pen. But “Trust” spoofs so much that it winds up spoofing itself. Novels must tell a truth, even when they don’t tell the truth.

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Hernan Diaz’s Trust Is a Buzzy, Enthralling Tour de Force and Winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize

Among Diaz’s literary influences are Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Karl Marx.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead wrong when he quipped that there are no second acts in American lives; as Hernan Diaz probes in Trust , his enthralling tour de force, there are at least four wildly disparate perspectives on the rich and infamous. He transports readers back to the Roaring Twenties and subsequent Depression, when our collective labors bore rotten fruit, seeding disparities that are still with us. He structures Trust around a childless, affluent Manhattan couple, Andrew and Mildred Bevel, in a quartet of narratives that open up like Matryoshka dolls: a novel, a partial memoir, a memoir of that memoir, and a journal. Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory. Free markets are never free, as he suggests; our desire to punish often trumps our generous impulses. As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money.

“And so it was that Helen, after each sleepless night spent talking to silent snooded nurses, was taken out into the garden with the first light and left alone on a chaise facing the mountains. She continued with her soliloquy while freeing herself from under the tightly tucked blankets. As the sun rose, however, her monologue declined into sporadic mutterings, which, in turn, melted in silence. For an hour or so, she would enjoy the bliss of impersonality—of becoming pure perception, of existing only as that which saw the mountaintop, heard the bell, smelled the air.”

Wordplay is Trust’s currency: The title refers not only to financial trusts but also the trust we place in each other, the contract between reader and author. As Vanner writes of Rask, “He created a trust meant exclusively for the working man. A small amount, the few hundred dollars in a modest savings account, was enough to get started.… A schoolteacher or farmer could then settle her or his debt in comfortable monthly payments.” But the social bonds in “Bonds” fray like a tattered rug. Just before the crash, Rask, sensing catastrophe, opts to make a buck at the expense of those at the bottom of the economic ladder: “He even divested from all his trusts, including the one he had designed for the working man.”

In Trust ’s second section, Bevel speaks for himself. Incensed by the publication of “Bonds” in 1938, following the death of his beloved Mildred, he’s determined to set the record straight. “My Life” is an incomplete memoir, but it defiantly affirms the WASP aristocracy as Bevel recalls the past generations of his family—their genius for business, their Hudson Valley estates and European sojourns. He leaves gaps in each chapter, where Diaz romps playfully, allowing the reader to glimpse another story nestled among white space. The Wall Street tycoon may bristle at an arriviste like Vanner, but each wave of the super-rich seeks to displace the established order, as Bevel’s note to himself indicates: “More details on transaction and personal meaning of taking over Vanderbilt house.”

Bevel casts himself in the best possible light, but Diaz gleefully exposes him as a priggish narcissist, a Jazz Age Koch brother. The entry titled “Apprenticeship” is left blank—he likes to present himself as a hard-working self-made man, a prodigy, when in fact he's inherited his fortune . He jots down terse fragments as placeholders in his manuscript: “Panic as an opportunity for forging new relationships” and “Short, dignified account of Mildred’s rapid deterioration.” Sometimes he breaks off mid-sentence.

Trust’s tricks propel the novel’s third section, told by Ida Partenza, an elderly literary journalist who, in her own memoir, reflects on the genesis of her career, when Bevel hired her as a secretary to shape his manuscript. She’s kept the secrets of her employment through the decades. In the 1980s, she learns that Andrew and Mildred’s personal papers have been archived in their former Upper East Side mansion, now a Frick-like museum. Her curiosity gets the better of her: Do their narratives differ from hers? Today Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood may be a gentrified, sought-after address, but in 1938 it was a working-class Italian enclave, bustling with bars and butcher shops, sailors and typesetters, like Ida’s immigrant father, a Marxist who shakes his fist at the Manhattan skyline across the East River. Her visit to the Bevel museum ushers us back into an America mired in economic woes, with World War II on the horizon.

During her time with Bevel, rendered in flashback, Ida marvels at the financier’s arrogance and self-delusion: “It was also of great importance to him to show the many ways in which his investments had always accompanied and indeed promoted the country’s growth.… While geared toward profit, his actions had invariably had the nation’s best interest at heart. Business was a form of patriotism.” Although Ida is from the wrong borough, Bevel respects her talent and candor. The mysteries mount as she recounts her boss’s lies; he’s borrowed a few details from her life to flesh out his own. For her, the act of memory is a vendetta.

In Diaz’s accomplished hands we circle ever closer to the black hole at the core of Trust. Mildred’s journal, “Futures,” squeezes the gravity from what’s come before, a dizzying crescendo and the novel’s most intimate section. Mildred doesn’t have a future, but she’s very keen on recording the past and present. Bevel is capable of tenderness, as when he organizes a surprise picnic for his spouse—“overstaffed + overfurnished,” she notes wryly. “He was uncomfortable. Kept looking at the sun filtering through the twiggery as if affronted by it. Smacking non-existent bugs on his face. But kindly looked after me.”

Which narrator do we trust? One or more, all, none?

Diaz owes debts to a range of influences, from Woolf and Wharton to thinkers such as Marx and Milton Friedman. Trust is a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery. It’s also a window onto Diaz’s method. Ida recalls the detective fiction she adored in her youth, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers: “These women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world.… They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: The reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted.”

He spins a larger parable, then, plumbing sex and power, causation and complicity. Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read. Or as Mildred writes in her journal, “a song played in reverse and on its head.”

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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In Hernan Diaz’s ‘Trust,’ the rich are not like you and me

Hernan Diaz’s new book, “ Trust ,” is about an early-20th-century investor. Or at least it seems to be. Everything about this cunning story makes a mockery of its title. The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book.

Though framed as a novel, “Trust” is actually an intricately constructed quartet of stories — what Wall Street traders would call a 4-for-1 stock split.

The first part is a novella titled “Bonds,” presented as the work by a now forgotten writer in the 1930s named Harold Vanner. A pastiche of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and Edith Wharton’s fiction, the story luxuriates in the tragic fate of America’s wealthiest man, Benjamin Rask. The opening line immediately signals the narrator’s mingled awe and reproof: “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.”

Diaz, writing as Vanner, spins the legend of an icy, isolated young man who quickly masters the levers of finance to transform his “respectable inheritance” into an unimaginably large estate. “His colleagues thought him prescient,” the narrator writes, “a sage with supernatural talents who simply could not lose.” Relying on a mixture of mathematical wizardry and infallible intuition, Rask profits in bull markets and bear markets, leveraging the gains of the Roaring Twenties and selling short just before the Crash of 1929. Indeed, there’s something vaguely sinister about Rask’s good fortune, a lingering sense that he’s pulling the strings of the national economy, profiting first off the naivete and then off the suffering of ordinary folks.

But Rask joins the right clubs, builds a gorgeous mansion and donates to the noblest causes, if only to keep his seclusion from attracting attention. Everything about his persona is carefully engineered to inspire veneration but not too much.

Chaos slips into the story through the heart when Rask falls in love with an equally eccentric young woman. United in their studied aloofness, Mr. and Mrs. Rask evolve into “mythical creatures in the New York society they so utterly disregarded, and their fabulous stature only increased with their indifference.”

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In each grandly choreographed chapter of this novella, disparate movements are gradually brought to conclusions both surprising and inevitable. With “Bonds,” Diaz has written a classic morality tale in the long tradition of America’s conflicted relationship with its aristocrats. If the Rasks’ opulence seems enviable, we must be assured that they suffered extravagantly, too. And so, when their fateful punishment arrives, it’s suitably shocking and humiliating, a melodrama of debasement designed to reassure readers that the ethical accounting of the universe cannot be cheated.

Diaz’s debut novel, “ In the Distance ,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and this opening section of “Trust” alone would have been sufficiently impressive to garner praise, but it’s just the first tranche of Diaz’s complicated project.

The next part of “Trust” is presented as an unfinished autobiography written by the wealthy financier portrayed in the previous, thinly disguised novella. Clearly, this memoir is meant to be a corrective for a public insatiably fascinated by the lives of successful businessmen. The whole manuscript is written in a pompous, defensive stance, laced with aphorisms about the wonder of free markets.

Between narrative passages, we can see editorial notes for future emendations, e.g. “MATH in great detail. Precocious talent. Anecdotes.” The effect is slightly embarrassing, like seeing a man brushing shoe polish on his gray hair. It’s a reminder of the self-serving, self-mythologizing function of all memoirs.

Ever the chameleon, Diaz shifts his style and tone in this section to reflect the wounded pride of a powerful man convinced that his life story, properly presented, will offer valuable instruction to posterity. But Diaz inhabits this voice so completely that he can simultaneously deconstruct that theme. The financier’s insistence on self-reliance only draws more attention to his dependence on inherited wealth. This is a man so steeped in self-pity that he regards the public’s misunderstanding of his vast fortune as “his cross to bear.” His repeated claims of devotion to the national good raise suspicions about his potentially fraudulent activity. And finally, his pat, sentimental appraisal of his wife feels more like an act of obliteration than appreciation.

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How piqued, then, our curiosity is when the third section of “Trust” arrives. It’s an autobiographical essay written many decades later by the financier’s ghost writer looking back at her life as a poor young woman. Enough time has passed for her to finally speak freely about the famous philanthropist, and yet her strange encounter was so long ago that much remains lost in the fog. Her tardy search for the truth becomes a fascinating exploration of the way history is shaped by facts, competing desires and even archival accidents.

As “Trust” moves into its fourth and final section, fans of Lauren Groff’s fantastic 2015 novel, “ Fates and Furies ,” will recognize a similar strategy — an exploration of convoluted and repressed testimonies behind the story of a great man. But Diaz is drawing on older feminist works, too, such as Jean Rhys’s “ Wide Sargasso Sea ” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The Yellow Wallpaper .” He’s interested not only in the way wealthy men burnish their image, but in the way such memorialization involves the diminishment, even the erasure of others.

In summary “Trust” sounds repellently overcomplicated, but in execution it’s an elegant, irresistible puzzle. The novel isn’t just about the way history and biography are written; it’s a demonstration of that process. By the end, the only voice I had any faith in belonged to Diaz.

Ron Charles writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

By Hernan Diaz

Riverhead. 416 pp. $28

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Trust by Hernan Diaz review – playful portrait of a Gatsby-like tycoon

When did wealth become the defining element of American success? This Booker-longlisted novel is a multilayered interrogation of ‘the fiction of money’

H ow is reality funded?” asks the wealthy tycoon at the centre of Hernan Diaz’s Booker-longlisted second novel. His answer is “fiction” – specifically, the “fiction of money”. The value of any commodity comes from us buying into its wider narrative. Unless we trust that a banknote “represents concrete goods”, it is just a piece of printed paper, as open to distortion as a novel, or a memoir, or a diary.

Trust incorporates all three of these literary forms. As with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Richard Powers’s The Overstory , its structure relies on interconnected narratives which deepen and destabilise one another. Diaz’s first novel, the Pulitzer prize finalist In the Distance , was about a penniless young Swedish immigrant meeting swindlers and fanatics in California. In Trust, he has built a postmodern version of a historical novel around a character at the other end of the economic scale – a Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York who dutifully hosts lavish parties at which he is rarely glimpsed. His name is Andrew Bevel, a guy who becomes “a wealthy man by playing the part of a wealthy man”. At his side is his seemingly longsuffering wife, Mildred, a figure occasionally reminiscent of Zelda Fitzgerald. The Bevels’s marriage is built around a “core of quiet discomfort”, a shared awkwardness which for them is “inherent to most exchanges”. If every get-rich tale is ultimately a crime narrative – a story of whodunnit, how and why – the central heist in Trust is the Wall Street crash of 1929 . By embracing the American spirit of “fake it till you make it”, Bevel finds that the financial crisis makes him even richer. Indeed, some New Yorkers start to claim that he caused it.

There is nothing wealthy individuals love less than a scandal – a moment when the reins of narrative-making slip out of their hands. Diaz’s own structure enacts this. The first part of Trust is a novel-within-the-novel: a fictionalised telling of the New York power couple’s lives. But that’s just the setup for the book’s second section, which presents itself as an autobiography by Mr Bevel himself. Like all vanity projects by unintentionally amusing millionaires, the purpose is “to address and refute” the fictions about him, setting the historical record straight once and for all. What unfolds is a hilarious send-up of the celebrity memoir, complete with a generic and self-aggrandising title (My Life), a heavy dose of misleading platitudes (“my wife was too fragile, too good for this world”), and occasional glimpses of the unabashed capitalist mentality underneath (“what matters is the tally of our accomplishments, not the tales about us”). Bevel’s later chapters descend into random notes towards a future draft we know this big shot mercifully lacks the self-awareness to finish (“WHOLE SECTION: ‘Clouds Thicken’ ?”).

The third section of Diaz’s book brings about another change of weather: it is a young Brooklyn woman’s account of meeting the ageing financier during the Great Depression, and being hired to help tell his story. At this point we begin to feel we are getting a handle on the Citizen Kane -style mystery driving the book: who was this tycoon, actually? And was his wife really just an accessory on his arm? But the novel’s fourth and final section pulls the rug from under us one last time, offering us fragments from Mildred’s long-withheld diary. Trust poses questions of authorship and ownership at every turn: when did wealth become the defining element of every American success story? What values and costs can be ascribed to the “Great Man” theory of history? And to whom do such men owe their greatest debts? If you imagine a brilliantly twisted mix of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Virginia Woolf’s journals, JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello , and Ryan Gosling’s breaking of the fourth wall in The Big Short, you’ll get some sense of the surprising hybrid Diaz has created.

It is perhaps telling that Diaz started his writing life with a scholarly text about Jorges Luis Borges, who once wrote that money represents “a panoply of possible futures”. A Borgesian sense of play imbues almost every page of Trust, along with a dash of Italo Calvino’s love of exploring different versions of a single idea or city. Through perfectly formed sentences and the skilful unpicking of certainties, Trust creates a great portrait of New York across an entire century of change – a metropolis that is “the capital of the future”, yet consists of citizens who are “nostalgic by nature”. A city that, in other words, looks backwards and forwards at the same time – as any place that mixes old money and new money must. Trust is so packed full of ironies that it can sometimes feel airless. But it is also a work possessed of real power and purpose. It invites us to think about why the category of imaginative play we most heavily reward as a society is the playing of financial markets, often at a heavy cost. It’s a testament to Diaz’s cunning abilities as a writer that you end his book thinking that – if truth is your goal – you might be better off relying on a novelist than a banker.

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by Hernan Diaz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2022

A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.

A tale of wealth, love, and madness told in four distinct but connected narratives.

Pulitzer finalist Diaz’s ingenious second novel—following In the Distance (2017)—opens with the text of Bonds , a Wharton-esque novel by Harold Vanner that tells the story of a reclusive man who finds his calling and a massive fortune in the stock market in the early 20th century. But the comforts of being one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.—even after the 1929 crash—are undone by the mental decline of his wife. Bonds is followed by the unfinished text of a memoir by Andrew Bevel, a famously successful New York investor whose life echoes many of the incidents in Vanner’s novel. Two more documents—a memoir by Ida Partenza, an accomplished magazine writer, and a diary by Mildred, Bevel’s brilliant wife—serve to explain those echoes. Structurally, Diaz’s novel is a feat of literary gamesmanship in the tradition of David Mitchell or Richard Powers. Diaz has a fine ear for the differing styles each type of document requires: Bonds is engrossing but has a touch of the fusty, dialogue-free fiction of a century past, and Ida is a keen, Lillian Ross–type observer. But more than simply succeeding at its genre exercises, the novel brilliantly weaves its multiple perspectives to create a symphony of emotional effects; what’s underplayed by Harold is thundered by Andrew, provided nuance by Ida, and given a plot twist by Mildred. So the novel overall feels complex but never convoluted, focused throughout on the dissatisfactions of wealth and the suppression of information for the sake of keeping up appearances. No one document tells the whole story, but the collection of palimpsests makes for a thrilling experience and a testament to the power and danger of the truth—or a version of it—when it’s set down in print.

Pub Date: May 3, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-42031-7

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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We Tell Ourselves Stories About Money to Live

Hernan Diaz’s new novel audaciously tells a tale of American capital—again, and again, and again.

Stories about American capitalism tend to have a recognizable villain: the robber baron, the business tycoon, the financial investor, your boss. But, as Karl Marx once put it, the evil capitalist “is only capital personified.” Far more chilling, he wrote, are the workings of capital itself, which, “vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Writing about that , as he knew firsthand, was much more difficult.

Look around today and it’s not hard to see capital’s life-sucking forces still at play: We sense them in tech companies’ profit motive , in the exploitation of migrant labor, in Amazon’s economic and physical domination . The world of industry and finance—and its long reach into our lives—has only grown more complex since Marx’s day. The challenge of writing about the shadowy system behind the “evil capitalist,” though, remains. How does one even begin to capture its contortions?

Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust , takes the challenge of narrating the entanglements of modern-day capitalism head-on. It begins with the lead-up to the Wall Street stock-market crash of 1929, following the sublime booms and busts of economic history from the vantage point of individual people. Trust is an audacious period piece that—over the course of four acts, each framed as a “book”—seeks to undo the hardened conventions undergirding myths about American power. And it deftly illustrates how stories about the nation’s exceptionalism are inextricable from the circulation of money.

Read: The paradox of caring about ‘bullshit’ jobs

Trust begins like a fairly conventional bourgeois novel that portrays the rich interior lives and domestic spaces of the elite ruling class. Its first book, “Bonds”—a salacious page-turner about a successful 1920s financier named Benjamin Rask and the mysterious illness and death of his wife, Helen—works like an act of narrative seduction, luring readers into the velvet-draped world of the 1 percent. “With perverse symmetry,” goes its gossipy narrator, “as Benjamin rose to new heights, Helen’s condition declined.”

Once it settles us in this milieu, however, Trust starts to strip it down to its foundations. Book two, “My Life,” is stylistically jarring: It’s the first-person account of a financier named Andrew Bevel, whose depiction of his stock-market success and his recently deceased wife, Mildred, eerily resembles the story just relayed in “Bonds.” Presented in manuscript form, Bevel’s autobiography is both bombastically overwritten (he frequently compares his life’s trajectory to that of the nation) and underwritten, peppered with little notes to himself to fill in details (“More on Mildred’s spirit”; “More home scenes. Her little touches. Anecdotes.”).

The overlapping characteristics between the two books are so uncanny that “My Life” initially reads like a mistake. On starting it, I kept flipping back to “Bonds” to confirm that I hadn’t gotten its characters’ names wrong. But book three, “A Memoir, Remembered,” clarifies the reason for this doubling. This first-person account is written by Bevel’s ghostwriter, Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian anarchist who works, much to her father’s chagrin, for their class enemy. Yet having been in Bevel’s confidence, Ida can, years after his death, now betray it: Her memoir reveals “Bonds” to have been the thinly veiled fictionalization of Bevel’s life following Mildred’s death. Bevel’s autobiography was, in turn, a highly orchestrated publicity stunt to override it—a project of “bending and aligning reality,” as he used to explain to her. Now “A Memoir, Remembered” is doing just that, once more.

In moving from the fluid, omniscient narrator of “Bonds” to Bevel’s badly written, halting I —and then subsequently revealing the latter to be manufactured as well—Diaz suggests that no individual perspective can be trusted. Each subsequent section torques and troubles how to approach the prior ones—the novel’s title becomes both a play on the financial instrument and an interpretive guide for the reader. Diaz keeps us guessing at what is “real” (a word that appears 34 times in the novel). We may think we know which character is most reliable, but tweak the lens ever so slightly and that comfort in an established viewpoint dissipates almost immediately.

The unraveling comes to a head in the enigmatic fourth book, “Futures,” which ultimately presents Mildred’s own, unfiltered voice. “Futures” consists of Mildred’s diary entries from her final days in a Swiss sanatorium as she appears to descend into madness. Mildred’s confessional scribblings convey the most private genre in Trust : They include the banal details of bad hospital food (“Already tired of milk + meat diet”) as well as more revelatory particulars about the hand she’s had in her husband’s financial success (“By trading in outsized amounts + inciting bursts of general frenzy, I started creating the lags”). With “Futures,” readers are forced to reevaluate what they thought they knew about the Bevels’ story—and about how money, and agency, gets distributed. If Mildred was in fact the financial genius in her marriage, she could only ever manipulate the stock market using her husband’s money and from his perch. Behind every powerful man, we might say, is a more brilliant woman running the numbers.

Read: Trust Exercise is an elaborate trick of a novel

We arrive at this realization not only through what Mildred writes but how she organizes it—not just through content but also through form. Her initial entries are clearly categorized under morning (“AM”), afternoon (“PM”), and evening (“EVE”), suggesting her attunement to the passing—and perhaps the consequences—of time. But by the end, her thoughts blur together. As Mildred’s body decays, so do her sentences, which start to fracture from paragraphs down to sentence fragments (“Confined to bed”; “No pleasure in juice”) and portmanteaus (“Befogged”; “Bird-crowded”). “Futures” concludes with ever more laconic phrases (“Mostly fruit / Hemicrania / Unable to do much”) that look less like the final lines of a novel than the beginning of poetic flight—of, we might say, future abstractions. The cozy bourgeois world of “Bonds” gets deconstructed, through Mildred’s words, into the harsh tones and angular vectors of high modernism. The progression suggests that one way fiction might approach the depiction of capitalist totality and its impossible forms is by presenting it, however futilely, through incommensurable shards.

That Trust ’s story unfolds rather like one of Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine stories isn’t happenstance. Originally trained as an academic, Diaz wrote his first book about Borges’s narrative puzzles. He’s also experimented himself with genre before: His debut novel, In the Distance , which was a finalist for a Pulitzer, was set during the California Gold Rush and played with the stylistic tropes of the Western. Trust continues to turn the screws of both genre and structure, relentlessly retelling the same story from different angles. “There is this priggishness around moneymaking,” Diaz recently told Vanity Fair , discussing the book. “It’s this enormous paradox in American history, between this priggishness and this hyperfetish around money.” In writing Trust , Diaz hoped to linger on some of the uglier aspects of wealth while also attending to people, and in particular women, who do not typically represent mythical American financial power.

Diaz shifts purposefully back and forth between these two lenses (the wide-angle and the close-up), sometimes even overlapping them in an uncanny palimpsest. In one striking scene, Ida observes Bevel staring out his office window, as a welder “sitting on a beam that seemed to be floating in the sky” looks back at him. She notes that “each man appeared to be hypnotized by the other,” before realizing that the welder is only gazing into his own reflection in the window. While Bevel can see the welder, the welder cannot look back—it’s essentially a one-way mirror. Rarely does Diaz inhabit the perspective of the worker, except when that worker comes within proximity to power (like Ida). More often, he gives texture to individuals who stand in (sometimes self-consciously) for the broader world of finance as a way of drawing readers closer to the abstract complexities of capital accumulation. In Trust , Bevel is almost the parody of a hubristic capitalist, writing in his memoir, “I saw not only the destiny of our great nation fulfilled but also my own.” But the arc of capital is longer than any single life, and Bevel hardly gets the final word here. As Ida and Mildred’s subsequent sections make clear, there is always someone else who can overwrite your story.

Trust ultimately refuses to clarify exactly what the true version of its story is, leaving readers to speculate on what is “real” and what is “fake.” Why Mildred suddenly gets sick right when Bevel’s fortune is ascending, and whether she’s the secret author of “Bonds” (a theory the reader is invited to entertain) are left open questions. “In and out of sleep,” goes Mildred’s final entry, “like a needle coming out from under a black cloth and then vanishing again. Unthreaded.” Trust ends not with a climactic bang but with a disappearing magic trick—and only the barest whisper of a possible heroine. We may not get close to grasping the heart of the mystery. But that’s hardly the point. Instead, we might at least begin to perceive how little it is we can see at all.

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Reviews of Trust by Hernan Diaz

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Hernan Diaz

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• Historical Fiction
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Book Summary

An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds , a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz's Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. According to the back of the Rask family Bible, in 1662 his father's ancestors had migrated from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where they started trading in tobacco from the Colonies. Over the next century, their business prospered and expanded to the extent that part of the family moved to America so they could better oversee their suppliers and control every aspect of production. Three generations later, Benjamin's father, Solomon, bought out all his relatives and outside investors. Under his sole direction, the company kept flourishing, and it did not take him long to become one of the most prominent tobacco traders on the Eastern Seaboard. It may have been true that his inventory was sourced from the...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Trust is a novel that is told through four separate documents – a novel-within-the-novel, an unfinished manuscript, a memoir, and a diary. Why do you think the author chose to tell the larger story this way? How do the different sections speak to each other?
• Each separate piece of the book offers a different character's perspective on the same period, subjects, relationships, and events, revealing new truths and calling others into question. Which revelations surprised you most? Whose perspective and narrative did you most enjoy or value and why?
• One of the major themes of Trust is power, who has it, how they got it, how they maintain it. Another theme is history, how it gets decided and shared, and who gets to tell the story. How...
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The novel is like a feminist retelling of a classic, male-oriented story, except that the original story is also one that Diaz wrote. Look at what is missing from these accounts, he implores us. Who do you believe? Trust is conventional in that our most pressing questions of plot are answered at the end, but there is no climactic eureka moment, where some crime is solved and the criminal is dramatically exposed—although there is one reveal, late in the book, that provides that satisfying feeling of shock and recognition: "Of course, how could I have not seen it coming?!".. continued

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Beyond the Book

How tv & film portrays capital accumulation.

Hernan Diaz has said about writing his novel Trust that, despite the numerous books depicting "the symptoms of wealth," "there are very, very few novels that deal with the process of accumulation of capital. This, to me, was baffling." This isn't surprising to me, as the accumulation of capital seems narratively uninteresting, at least less interesting than stories about the lives of wealthy people or the psychological wounds that keep them from appreciating their money. The accumulation of capital Diaz is talking about—investment—is not even necessarily "striking it rich." It is often having a significant amount of money in the first place and growing it, which is interesting in its perverse banality, but not exactly exciting. ...

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From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

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Can a Novel Capture the Power of Money?

By David S. Wallace

Readers of fiction often ask to be transported. To be “moved” is the great passive verb of experiencing art: we are absorbed, we are overtaken. If we take the phrase at face value, we are most excited when we are least participants—when we surrender to the power of an art work, trusting the artist, or even that greater and more nebulous power we call “the story,” to take us somewhere we could not have foreseen.

Markets move, too, through a force we don’t quite understand. Though Adam Smith rarely used the phrase in his writings, his metaphor of the invisible hand has—true to the image—gradually taken on a life of its own. The idea that the market has an independent power, directing itself better than any individual could, dominated the twentieth century, and grew especially pronounced after the Second World War, as the gospel of deregulation swept across the globe. As Ronald Reagan put it, “the magic of the marketplace” was at work. And yet the invisible hand appears only once in Smith’s landmark work, “ The Wealth of Nations ,” as part of a withering assessment of good intentions. The true capitalist, Smith writes,

intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

Even if an investor wanted to improve society, Smith argues, his bright ideas would be less effective than the aggregate flows of supply and demand. Money moves in mysterious ways, and regardless of whether the effects are harmonious, or simply random, they’re felt in daily life: a good deal on a mortgage one year might mean foreclosure the next. This impersonal force can feel like a god to whose whims we are subject. Maybe even like an author moving characters across the page.

In one sense, money has always powered the novel. Plot is derived from loss and gain, whether it’s the passive income of a Jane Austen suitor or the grinding poverty depicted in Knut Hamsun’s “ Hunger .” But as money became a global system—a vast web of transactions, fascinating precisely because it has no signature image, no physical presence—the task of portraying it became trickier. The large banks and mythic financiers of the nineteenth century were useful symbols, dramatized in novels by Dickens, Balzac, and Zola. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, global finance lodged itself permanently in the public imagination, and novelists tried once more to capture its bland totality. Zia Haider Rahman’s “ In the Light of What We Know ,” about a banker who observes a classmate straying dangerously from the path of prosperity, linked the shadowy world of finance to the war on terror. John Lanchester’s “ Capital ” studied a street of London houses—the literal capital of the row’s inhabitants—to chart a constellation of urban lives. For the most part, though, markets elude the grasp of representation. How can a novel capture this opaque, all-powerful, and essential force?

In “ Trust ,” Hernan Diaz takes a unique approach to the problem. The book—which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and will soon be adapted into a TV series starring Kate Winslet—manipulates the machinery of story itself, presenting four narratives that interlock like nesting boxes. Diaz’s title hints at his intentions: in financial terms, a trust is an arrangement that allows a third party to hold assets for a beneficiary. (A bank, for example, might manage an inheritance until the inheritor reaches a certain age.) This, of course, requires a belief that the bank is a stable, even benevolent institution. Diaz’s novel suggests that a similar compact sustains the world of narrative. A story, like a dollar bill, can do its work only when we accept its value, when we know that we’re in safe hands. Once we question it, things get more complicated.

“Trust” begins with a novel-within-a-novel: a book by a writer named Harold Vanner called “Bonds.” It tells the story of Benjamin Rask, a scion of an New York, Gilded Age family, who has “enjoyed almost every advantage since birth.” Rask is a restless youth, indifferent to high-society luxury; nothing seems to interest him until he discovers the magic of the stock market. Transfixed by the ticker-tape feed, he transforms his inheritance into a financial juggernaut, a firm trading in “gold and guano, in currencies and cotton, in bonds and beef.”

Rask is a taciturn character, stripped of personality and defined largely in the negative: he is “an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover.” Even his interest in money is somewhat abstract. But this blank, sterile quality reflects his vocation, an inscrutable trade that remains almost monstrously real:

If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details.

A fortune comes easily to Rask; the question is what to do with it. In classic novelistic fashion, he decides to find a wife. Enter Helen Brevoort, the only daughter of a hard-up but respectable family, and a mathematics prodigy who performs in the expatriate salons of Europe. Helen and Benjamin marry, but Helen can’t reciprocate Benjamin’s love—there is always a chilly “distance” between them. Her talents and imagination are neutralized, then funnelled into philanthropy, the classic pressure valve of capital accumulation. When Benjamin achieves even more staggering profits by shorting the crash of 1929, the Rasks become social pariahs, and Helen slips into a mysterious illness. As the story comes to a tragic close, the reader looks up to discover that they’re only a quarter of the way through the novel.

Diaz is an author who confidently, often gleefully, rejects literary trends. His first novel, “ In the Distance ” (2017), was published when he was in his mid-forties, working as a scholar at Columbia; the manuscript was plucked out of a slush pile and went on to receive a Pulitzer nomination. The book is an offbeat Western whose protagonist, a hulking Swede named Håkan, boards the wrong boat—to San Francisco instead of New York City. He spends the rest of the story travelling not west but east, in order to find his brother. The standard tropes are there, from devious gold prospectors to endless wagon trains, but the form is scrambled; Diaz triggers the pleasure of recognition without collapsing into cliché. He creates a rich odyssey of American weirdness: turn the page, and a new mad scientist or religious cult might appear.

Diaz doesn’t endow Håkan with much interiority; we rarely get access to his thoughts, and his conversations are stymied by the language barrier—a clever twist on the strong, silent type. Similarly, “Bonds,” the novel-within-a-novel, has no dialogue from its characters, and so can feel like a summary, an outline awaiting further development. But this text is just the first piece of the puzzle. The next section is a manuscript entitled “My Life,” by someone named Andrew Bevel. Narrated in the first person, Bevel’s life clearly resembles Rask’s—he’s a rich New York financier who profited from the crash and whose wife died from an illness—but the details start to blur and diverge. More strangely, a curious unevenness begins to surface in the text, as if the writing were giving notes to itself:

More examples of his business acumen. Show his pioneering spirit. […] More about mother.

There is something deft and quite funny about this maneuver—in peeking into the unfinished manuscript of a vain billionaire’s memoir, one feels a surprising intimacy, even as you learn the shortcomings of the subject’s imagination. It’s clear that Bevel’s “Life” exists to correct his fictionalization in “Bonds,” which portrays him as callous, at best, and at worst coldly villainous toward his wife. Unfortunately, Bevel can’t quite seem to muster evidence for his compassion: “She touched everyone with her kindness and generosity. Examples.” There’s a deep readerly pleasure in this detective work, in asking how these two “books” are related, and why. Though their specifics differ, there is a shared belief in the near-religious power of market forces. As Bevel writes, “finance is the thread that runs through every aspect of life. It is indeed the knot where all the disparate strands of human existence come together.” But how can we trust him, or even be sure that all the strands cohere?

Diaz’s exploration of these questions, stitched together with various metafictional threads, owes something to the high-postmodern school of writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and David Markson. Gaddis’s mammoth second novel “ J R ” may be the novel’s closest relation, at least thematically; it centers on an eleven-year-old student who constructs a financial empire largely over the phone, highlighting the sheer chaos underlying financial genius. (The novel is written almost entirely in dialogue.) Even when the postmodern novel doesn’t portray the sprawling network of globalized finance, it’s drawn to shadowy networks that suggest it—for instance, the international postal-service conspiracy in Pynchon’s “ The Crying of Lot 49 .” Some critics have referred to these works as “systems novels,” books that map the myriad, often contradictory structures that define the modern world. Diaz’s novel, however, doesn’t quite fit this definition. Instead of trying to dramatize the sheer scale of global finance, each episode in “Trust” hints at the deceptions of a great, airy abstraction. The drama lies in trying to puzzle out where Diaz will take you next, what’s been hidden, and why.

Although “Trust” belongs to the postmodern tradition, its direct lineage is more specific. Just as “In the Distance” was a pastiche of the Western genre, “Trust” is a pastiche, too, though Diaz savvily disguises his sources. Is the book a sly take on the robber barons of the Gilded Age? A scrambled version of “ The Great Gatsby ,” with Rask and Bevel losing their loved ones despite their titanic wealth? Or is it an homage to Progressive-era novels like Theodore Dreiser’s “ The Financier ,” which is coyly cited in the text?

The philosopher Fredric Jameson placed pastiche at the center of postmodernism, calling it “blank parody”: a collection of codes or references, specific to a subject or field, that don’t make a particular comment on that subject, as a parody might. For Jameson, the form’s popularity was discouraging: books such as E.L. Doctorow’s “ Ragtime ,” though admirable, didn’t properly represent experience, instead borrowing styles, images, and ideas and rearranging them into a kind of fantasy. Global markets were another source of “dead language,” spreading the jargon of “faceless masters,” whose policies “constrain our existences.” Diaz’s achievement is to turn the weapon back on its wielder. He realizes that pastiche is similar to an option or a derivative—an act of placing value on the value of something, rather than on the thing itself. Using the tools of the “faceless masters,” he foregrounds the individuals, and the idiosyncracies, so often lost in vagaries of the system.

The third section of “Trust” continues to complicate the picture. Titled “A Memoir, Remembered,” its narrator is a famous writer named Ida Partenza, whose recollections begin as she strolls uptown to Bevel House, the financier’s mansion turned museum. Partenza, who has declined an offer to write about the museum, has a secret connection to Bevel: as a young woman, she was hired to ghostwrite his failed memoir. Her rise from humble Brooklyn origins into the rarified world of finance helps to expand the novel’s vision—under Bevel, she performed labor just as “invisible” as the banking exploits she was hired to embellish. Her education as a writer adds another self-reflexive touch; in order to invent her employer’s voice, she hit the library, looking for memoirs of “Great American Men,” learning to ventriloquize Bevel’s bland language of dollars. In some ways, her section is the most conventional one: it’s a bildungsroman with intrigue and round characters, shifting back and forward in time. Partenza’s father, a printer and anarchist ex-agitator, adds a political perspective that’s absent in the book’s more moneyed figures. Both a dreamer and a voice of reason, he has perhaps the keenest sense of the relationship between money and narrative: “Stock, shares and all that garbage are just claims to a future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.”

In the final section, Diaz turns to the most private part of this tangled network. “Futures” is the diary of Mildred, Andrew Bevel’s wife—the figure around whom so much of “Trust” revolves, but who has until now remained elusive. Mildred writes from a sanatorium, and her spare, cryptic jottings feel like the pearl at the book’s center, partly because they insist on the specificity of individual experience. Mildred is poetic in her attention to sensation, as when a nurse covers her “with a sheet that first balloons with a breeze of camphor and then settles with a waft of, I suppose, Alpine herbs. Gooseflesh.” Bevel believed that he could project his genius into the unfilled spaces of his memoir, but Mildred’s world seems to be receding, as death makes money irrelevant. She is deeply aware of the one experience that can’t be exchanged with anything else: “Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one.” The value she places on perception, its fleeting integrity, is antithetical to the financial schemes and elaborate fictions that characterize the rest of “Trust.” Diaz masterfully orchestrates a retreat that, while never disputing finance’s pervasiveness, hints at where a refuge from its predations might lie.

Financial faith relies on the notion that everything works out for the best, irrespective of individual desires. “Trust” gives the reader opportunities to feel that same tension in narrative itself, to question the apparently smooth operations of fiction while still becoming invested in its drama. Through these indirections, Diaz leads the reader on a journey from abstractions—all that literature is capable of representing, including the markets and moneymen that rule the world—down to something small, private, and experiential. Perhaps “Trust,” in the end, makes a surprisingly un-postmodern case for what the novel can do. It can deliver discrete, luminous sensations. It can make one subjectivity clear at a time. And it can help you appreciate experience—your hand in front of your face—before it disappears. ♦

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Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner) Hardcover – May 3, 2022

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• Reading age 1 year and up
• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Dimensions 6.23 x 1.38 x 9.3 inches
• Publisher Riverhead Books
• Publication date May 3, 2022
• ISBN-10 0593420314
• ISBN-13 978-0593420317
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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

ONE Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. According to the back of the Rask family Bible, in 1662 his father's ancestors had migrated from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where they started trading in tobacco from the Colonies. Over the next century, their business prospered and expanded to the extent that part of the family moved to America so they could better oversee their suppliers and control every aspect of production. Three generations later, Benjamin's father, Solomon, bought out all his relatives and outside investors. Under his sole direction, the company kept flourishing, and it did not take him long to become one of the most prominent tobacco traders on the Eastern Seaboard. It may have been true that his inventory was sourced from the finest providers on the continent, but more than in the quality of his merchandise, the key to Solomon's success lay in his ability to exploit an obvious fact: there was, of course, an epicurean side to tobacco, but most men smoked so that they could talk to other men. Solomon Rask was, therefore, a purveyor not only of the finest cigars, cigarillos, and pipe blends but also (and mostly) of excellent conversation and political connections. He rose to the pinnacle of his business and secured his place there thanks to his gregariousness and the friendships cultivated in the smoking room, where he was often seen sharing one of his figurados with some of his most distinguished customers, among whom he counted Grover Cleveland, William Zachary Irving, and John Pierpont Morgan. At the height of his success, Solomon had a townhouse built on West 17th Street, which was finished just in time for Benjamin's birth. Yet Solomon was seldom to be seen at the New York family residence. His work took him from one plantation to another, and he was always supervising rolling rooms or visiting business associates in Virginia, North Carolina, and the Caribbean. He even owned a small hacienda in Cuba, where he passed the greater part of each winter. Rumors concerning his life on the island established his reputation as an adventurer with a taste for the exotic, which was an asset in his line of business. Mrs. Wilhelmina Rask never set foot on her husband's Cuban estate. She, too, was absent from New York for long stretches, leaving as soon as Solomon returned and staying at her friends' summerhouses on the east bank of the Hudson or their cottages in Newport for entire seasons. The only visible thing she shared with Solomon was a passion for cigars, which she smoked compulsively. This being a very uncommon source of pleasure for a lady, she would only indulge in private, in the company of her girl-friends. But this was no impediment, since she was surrounded by them at all times. Willie, as those in her set called her, was part of a tightly knit group of women who seemed to constitute a sort of nomadic tribe. They were not only from New York but also from Washington, Philadelphia, Providence, Boston, and even as far as Chicago. They moved as a pack, visiting one another's houses and vacation homes according to the seasons-West 17th Street became the coterie's abode for a few months, starting in late September, when Solomon left for his hacienda. Still, no matter in what part of the country the ladies happened to dwell, the clique invariably kept to itself in an impenetrable circle. Limited, for the most part, to his and his nursemaids' rooms, Benjamin had only a vague notion of the rest of the brownstone where he grew up. When his mother and her friends were there, he was kept away from the rooms where they smoked, played cards, and drank Sauternes well into the night; when they were gone, the main floors became a dim succession of shuttered windows, covered furniture, and chandeliers in ballooning shrouds. All of his nurses and governesses said he was a model child, and all of his tutors confirmed it. Manners, intelligence, and obedience had never been combined as harmoniously as in this sweet-tempered child. The only fault some of his caregivers could find after much searching was Benjamin's reluctance to associate with other children. When one of his tutors attributed his student's friendlessness to fear, Solomon waved his concerns away, saying the boy was just becoming a man of his own. His lonely upbringing did not prepare him for boarding school. During the first term, he became the object of daily indignities and small cruelties. In time, however, his classmates discovered that his impassiveness made him a dissatisfying victim and left him alone. He kept to himself and excelled, dispassionately, in every subject. At the end of each year, after bestowing on him all available honors and distinctions, his teachers, without fail, would remind him that he was meant to bring much glory to the Academy. During his senior year, his father died of heart failure. At the service, back in New York, relatives and acquaintances alike were impressed by Benjamin's composure, but the truth was that mourning simply had given the natural dispositions of his character a socially recognizable form. In a display of great precocity that baffled his father's attorneys and bankers, the boy requested to examine the will and all the financial statements related to it. Mr. Rask was a conscientious, tidy man, and his son found no fault with the documents. Having concluded this business and knowing what to expect once he came of age and into possession of his inheritance, he returned to New Hampshire to finish school. His mother spent her brief widowhood with her friends in Rhode Island. She went in May, shortly before Benjamin's graduation, and by the end of the summer had died from emphysema. The family and friends who attended this second, much more subdued memorial barely knew how to speak to the young man orphaned in the course of a mere few months. Thankfully, there were many practical issues to discuss-trusts, executors, and the legal challenges in settling the estate. Benjamin's experience as a college student was an amplified echo of his years as a schoolboy. All the same inadequacies and talents were there, but now he seemed to have acquired a cold sort of fondness for the former and a humble disdain for the latter. Some of the more salient traits of his lineage appeared to have come to an end with him. He could not have been more different from his father, who had owned every room he had walked into and made everyone in it gravitate around him, and he had nothing in common with his mother, who had probably never spent a day of her life alone. These discrepancies with his parents became even more accentuated after his graduation. He moved back from New England to the city and failed where most of his acquaintances thrived-he was an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover. He, who owed his fortune to tobacco, did not even smoke. Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress.

The tobacco business could not have interested Benjamin less. He disliked both the product-the primitive sucking and puffing, the savage fascination with smoke, the bittersweet stench of rotten leaves-and the congeniality around it, which his father had enjoyed so much and exploited so well. Nothing disgusted him more than the misty complicities of the smoking room. Despite his most honest efforts, he could not argue, with any semblance of passion, for the virtue of a lonsdale over a diadema, and he was unable to sing, with the vigor that only firsthand knowledge can impart, the praise of the robustos from his Vuelta Abajo estate. Plantations, curing barns, and cigar factories belonged to a remote world he had no interest in getting to know. He would have been the first to admit he was an appalling ambassador for the company and therefore delegated daily operations to the manager who had served under his father for two faithful decades. It was against the advice of this manager that Benjamin, through agents he never met in person, undersold his father's Cuban hacienda and everything in it, without even taking an inventory. His banker invested the money in the stock market, together with the rest of his savings.  A few stagnant years went by, during which he made halfhearted attempts at starting different collections (coins, china, friends), dabbled in hypochondria, tried to develop an enthusiasm for horses, and failed to become a dandy. Time became a constant itch. Against his true inclinations, he started planning a trip to Europe. All that interested him about the Old Continent he had already learned through books; experiencing those things and places was of no importance to him. And he did not look forward to being confined on a ship with strangers for days on end. Still, he told himself that if he ever would leave, this would be the proper moment: the general atmosphere in New York City was rather glum as the result of a series of financial crises and the ensuing economic recession that had engulfed the country for the last two years. Because the downturn did not affect him directly, Benjamin was only vaguely aware of its causes-it had all started, he believed, with the burst of the railroad bubble, somehow linked to a subsequent silver crash, leading, in turn, to a run on gold, which, in the end, resulted in numerous bank failures in what came to be known as the panic of 1893. Whatever the actual chain of events might have been, he was not worried. He had a general notion that markets swung back and forth and was confident that today's losses would be tomorrow's gains. Rather than discouraging his European excursion, the financial crisis-the worst since the Long Depression, two decades earlier-was among the strongest encouragements he found to leave. As he was about to set a date for his journey, his banker informed him that, through some of his "connections," he had been able to subscribe to bonds issued to restore the nation's gold reserves, whose depletion had driven so many banks to insolvency. The entire issue had sold out in a mere half hour, and he had turned a handsome profit within the week. Thus, unsolicited luck, in the form of favorable political shifts and market fluctuations, led to the sudden and seemingly spontaneous growth of Benjamin's respectable inheritance, which he had never cared to enlarge. But once chance had done it for him, he discovered a hunger at his core he did not know existed until it was given a bait big enough to stir it to life. Europe would have to wait. Rask's assets were in the conservative care of J. S. Winslow & Co., the house that had always managed the family's business. The firm, founded by one of his father's friends, was now in the hands of John S. Winslow Jr., who had tried and failed to befriend Benjamin. As a result of this, the relationship between the two young men was somewhat uneasy. Still, they worked together closely-even if it was through messengers or over the telephone, either of which Benjamin preferred to redundant and laboriously genial face-to-face meetings. Soon, Benjamin became adept at reading the ticker tape, finding patterns, intersecting them, and discovering hidden causal links between apparently disconnected tendencies. Winslow, realizing his client was a gifted learner, made things look more arcane than they truly were and dismissed his predictions. Even so, Rask started making his own decisions, usually against the firm's counsel. He was drawn to short-term investments and instructed Winslow to make high-risk trades in options, futures, and other speculative instruments. Winslow would always urge caution and protest against these reckless schemes: he refused to put Benjamin in a position to lose his capital in hazardous ventures. But more than worried about his client's assets, Winslow seemed to be concerned about appearances and eager to display a certain financial decorum-after all, as he once said, laughing shallowly at his own wit, he was, if anything, a bookkeeper, not a bookmaker, in charge of a finance house, not a gambling house. From his father, he had inherited a reputation for pursuing sound investments, and he intended to honor this legacy. Still, in the end, he always followed Rask's directives and kept his commissions. Within a year, tired of his advisor's priggishness and ponderous pace, Rask decided to start trading on his own account and dismissed Winslow. Severing all ties with the family that had been so close to his for two generations was an added satisfaction to the feeling of true achievement Rask experienced, for the first time in his life, when he took the reins of his affairs.

The two lower floors of his brownstone became a makeshift office. This transformation was not the result of a plan but, rather, the effect of meeting unforeseen needs one by one, as they came, until, unexpectedly, there was something like a workspace filled with employees. It started with a messenger, whom Benjamin had running all over town with stock certificates, bonds, and other documents. A few days later, the boy let him know he had to have help. Together with an additional messenger, Benjamin got a telephone girl and a clerk, who soon informed him he was unable to cope on his own. Managing his people was taking vital time away from Benjamin's business, so he hired an assistant. And keeping books simply became too time-consuming, so he engaged an accountant. By the time his assistant got an assistant, Rask stopped keeping track of the new hires and no longer bothered to remember anyone's face or name. The furniture that had remained untouched and under covers for years was now handled irreverently by secretaries and errand boys. A stock ticker had been installed on the walnut serving table; quote boards covered most of the gilt-embossed foliage wallpaper; piles of newspapers had stained the straw-yellow velvet of a settee; a typewriter had dented a satinwood bureau; black and red ink blotched the needlework upholstery of divans and sofas; cigarettes had burned the serpentine edges of a mahogany desk; hurried shoes had scuffed oak claw feet and soiled, forever, Persian runners. His parents' rooms were left intact. He slept on the top floor, which he had never even visited as a child. It was not hard to find a buyer for his father's business. Benjamin encouraged a manufacturer from Virginia and a trading company from the United Kingdom to outbid each other. Wishing to distance himself from that part of his past, he was pleased to see the British prevail, thus sending the tobacco company whence it had come. But what truly gratified him was that with the profits from this sale he was able to work on a higher plane, manage a new level of risk, and finance long-term transactions he had been unable to consider in the past. Those around him were confused to see his possessions decrease in direct proportion to his wealth. He sold all remaining family properties, including the brownstone on West 17th Street, and everything in them. His clothes and papers fit into two trunks, which were sent to the Wagstaff Hotel, where he took a suite of rooms. He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what the increasing numbers represented or afforded him. Luxury was a vulgar burden. The access to new experiences was not something his sequestered spirit craved. Politics and the pursuit of power played no part in his unsocial mind. Games of strategy, like chess or bridge, had never interested him. If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that Benjamin never could have anticipated—and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired it and understood it, even when it disappointed him.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; First Edition (May 3, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593420314
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593420317
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 1 year and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.23 x 1.38 x 9.3 inches
• #50 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
• #228 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #621 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Hernan diaz.

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust. Translated into more than thirty languages, Trust also received the Kirkus Prize, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO. Diaz’s previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it won the William Saroyan International Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

https://www.hernandiaz.net/

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'Trust' by Hernan Diaz: An unconventional and thought-provoking work

The author describes ‘Trust’ as a polyphonic novel

‘Trust’ is not a simple story for the passive pleasure of reading. It is a complex and unconventional novel that provokes the readers to think, detect, imagine and question. Within the book, there are four different books written by different fictional authors in disparate genres and styles. There are multiple characters at different time periods.

The author describes ‘Trust’ as a polyphonic novel. The first section is a novel written by a fictional writer Harold Vanner about New York financier Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen who patronizes arts and culture. Although Harold Vanner is one of the central characters in the book he never appears in it. Vanner opens the book and triggers everything that happens in it: several people in “the real world” react to Vanner’s book, setting the whole plot in motion.

The second part is a memoir of Andrew Bevel, a Wall Street tycoon who wants people to believe that his pursuit of profit was always aligned to the social good. His wife Mildred is a connoisseur of music and a lover of literature. They live together physically but live apart mentally.

They find that the living together improves by the vast distance between their minds of which one is obsessed with money and the other arts. At times, Mildred dabbles in stocks and gives valuable advice to her husband which he uses to make more money. 

The third part is about Ida Partenza a writer who becomes secretary to the tycoon and ghost-writes his autobiography. Her father is an anarchist and an immigrant from Italy. She is caught between the anti-capitalist rants of her father and working with the wealthy financier who wants her to help with his autobiography spinning a positive image of his business and the cultural activities of his wife who becomes mentally ill.

Diaz says in an interview, “ I enjoyed particularly writing the character of Ida. She is like my hero—she’s fearless, effective, crafty, and very bold. I made her all the things that I wish I were. She’s also a very different writer from me, so I had to learn to write like her”. 

The fourth part is the personal diary of Mildred, the tycoon’s wife “that is also a sort of a prose poem and a love letter to modernism”, in the words of the author. Midred writes about music, art, philosophy, her illness, the stock market and Swiss mountain slopes among which she convalesces in a clinic.

The connecting themes in all the four books are the Wall Street money-making and the world of art and literature. The author has juxtaposed the two themes with provocative pronouncements challenging the conventional American narratives and myths about money. He has chosen the boom years of the Wall Street in the twenties and the bust in 1929 followed by the years of depression for context. 

Diaz says he wanted to write about the labyrinth of capital, how it works and distorts the reality around itself in the American value system. He is fascinated by the ‘transcendental and mythical place of money in the American culture’. He explores how wealth creates isolation for the wealthy while giving the person extraordinary outreach to the world of art, culture and politics. According to Diaz “money is also a fiction. It is just that we have all agreed on the terms and conditions and agreed to play it as a game. There is nothing that ties money to real value other than a narrative. Or the trust that we invest in that narrative”. 

In another interview, Diaz says, “Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. As you read  Trust  and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text. I would even say that  Trust  aims, to an enormous extent, to question the boundaries between history and fiction”.

Here are some vignettes from the novel:

  -He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what his earnings. He viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that he never could have anticipated—and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired and understood it, even when it disappointed him.

-The root of all evil, the cause of every war—god and country.

- History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army.

-Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.

-Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy. When we first wake up in the morning we trade rest for profit. When we go to bed at night we give up potentially profitable hours to renew our strength. And throughout our day we engage in countless transactions. Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable. But the truth is our existence revolves around profit.

Hernan Diaz’s cerebral perspectives, intriguing plots and unconventional literary tools reminds me of Jorge Borges the famous Argentine writer. Diaz says, “Borges has shaped me not only as a reader and as a writer but also as a person. His playfulness with genre, his joyful disregard for taxonomies of any kind and his obsession with framed narratives are some of the aspects of his work that have influenced me”. Diaz has written a book “Borges, between history and eternity”.

Diaz believes that "fiction has palpable effects on reality. A lot of the power constraints that we feel in our everyday lives are based on fiction. Think of something that is as inherent and powerful to you as your nationality. That is, at the end of the day, a collection of ideological fictions. There's nothing in it. Nothing. Think about it for a second. There's nothing that makes you American or Belgian or anything aside from what you ascribe to that identity, and that is a series of narratives”.

Diaz is a voracious reader. In interviews, he quotes so many writers and points out parts of his novel which have styles similar to some of the writers. After having read 29 books of P G Wodehouse he says, “ I love Wodehouse. Ever-surprising in his repetitiousness, never failing to delight, always making us safe in his breezy world. It is paradoxical that Wodehouse should give me so much comfort when he also makes me feel how mean and shabby my life is each time I emerge from one of his novels”.

Some authors write well but not impressive in speeches and conversations. Diaz is spectacular and mesmerizing both in writing and talking with his spontaneous thoughts and reflections. I have read some of his interviews which are as fascinating and inspiring as his book. He revels in abstract concepts and subversive thoughts. He calls writing as a monstrous act because it implies a metamorphosis. 

Diaz says, “I write with a fountain pen (received as gift twenty years back) in large format notebooks. I enjoy the feeling of flowing ink and the rumor of the pen on the paper. With a pen, you create your own geography, with its islets of thoughts and streams of associations”. 

‘Trust’ has won the 2023 Pulitzer prize for fiction. It is the second novel of Diaz. I cannot wait to read his first novel “In the Distance”. 

Hernan Diaz is a potential candidate for Nobel Prize.

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Trust by Hernan Diaz

• Publication Date: May 2, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• ISBN-10: 0593420322
• ISBN-13: 9780593420324
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A Rare Inside Look at Human Smuggling on the Border

In “Soldiers and Kings,” the anthropologist Jason De León interviews smugglers, arguing that they are victims of poverty and violence, even as they exploit the humans in their care.

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By Jennifer Szalai

SOLDIERS AND KINGS: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling , by Jason De León

The anthropologist Jason De León dedicated five years to studying migrants who tried to make the deadly crossing into the United States over the Sonoran Desert, hiking hundreds of miles of the trails himself so that he could better understand the dangers faced by the people he interviewed. His intensive fieldwork made its way into his 2015 book, “The Land of Open Graves,” and in 2017 he was granted a MacArthur fellowship. Yet he could see that he was still missing a crucial part of the story.

His new book, “Soldiers and Kings,” is an account of the nearly seven years he spent with the people hired by migrants to help them get to the border — smugglers, that is, though their preferred term is guía , or “guide,” as in “the one who can potentially lead you through danger.”

De León is sympathetic, and can sometimes verge on sentimental. He begins his book by arguing that far from being cruel kingpins getting rich off other people’s desperation, smugglers are like the migrants themselves: poor people trying to escape the same violence and hardship. But the reality he portrays is far more complicated; however victimized they are by the forces bearing down on them, smugglers wield undeniable power over the vulnerable migrants in their care.

As treacherous as border-crossing can be for Mexicans, the journey for Central Americans is even more perilous. They cover larger distances, and must avoid detection by law enforcement in multiple countries. De León spent a lot of time in Pakal-Ná, in Chiapas, Mexico, a key stop on the migrant trail for those entering the country from neighboring Guatemala.

There, he befriended several guías from Honduras: low-level smugglers like Chino and Santos, who say they would rather make a living doing something else; Flaco, a tall-tale teller with “obnoxious charisma” who hires foot soldiers like Chino and Santos; Papo and Alma, a couple who are trying to get humanitarian visas to stay in Mexico but are also trading information for a local chapter of MS-13; and Kingston, seemingly the highest-level smuggler of the bunch, who tells De León that “real guides” have to be ready to navigate violence on the trail. They have to be willing “to get their hands dirty,” or, as Kingston puts it, “to be down with crazies.”

The smugglers De León talks to have certain things in common, including experiences with crushing poverty and horrific violence. A few lived in the United States for a while: Santos worked in construction in Phoenix; Kingston even obtained a green card in New York as a teenager, long before 9/11 turned border enforcement into a military operation, but he was deported back to Honduras after moving up in the ranks of the Bloods and bashing someone’s face in with a .22.

But the smugglers’ motivations and aspirations vary. Santos wants a life that is safe and stable, and he eventually leaves the guía business: “I’d rather be struggling on the streets than taking orders from people who could end up killing me.” Kingston, who seems to sense the kind of thing that De León might like to hear, says he wants to open a shelter for migrants because he can “really help people.” Such declarations sit uneasily alongside Kingston’s boasts about money. “I’m making it! $1,500, $5,000, $10,000. Goddamn!”

Much of “Soldiers and Kings” is devoted to strikingly candid oral history. Given that De León spent years getting to know people as a participant and an observer, doing what he calls “deep hanging out,” his subjects start to trust him and begin to reveal themselves — no small feat, considering that suspicion and mistrust are a matter of professional (and physical) survival.

At the same time, there are some people De León doesn’t really want to talk to. “I avoided those who gave off a bad vibe,” he writes, recognizing that migrants cannot afford to be so choosy. I also wondered what this methodology meant for his sample, composed mostly of smugglers who feel conflicted about the work they do. Still, he keeps up a text exchange with Payaso, “the Clown,” an enforcer for a midlevel smuggler who charges a toll to migrants passing through Pakal-Ná. Payaso has a reputation for committing acts of grisly violence when people don’t pay up; he also happens to be an “avid knitter.” After he is charged with murder, he embarks on some knitting projects in prison, including a SpongeBob SquarePants bag for De León.

De León explains that he mostly avoided interviewing the migrants who had hired the smugglers he spoke to, “because of worries that they would say something that could anger their guide and put their trip at risk.” His caution is understandable, though it largely prevents him from corroborating what the guías tell him about their work. “I want my kid to see me working,” Flaco says. “I’m not robbing people. I’m not doing bad things to be able to feed them.” A few pages later, however, De León gets a call from a young Honduran migrant, who says through tears that he’s stranded in Mexicali because Flaco took his money “and never came back.”

It’s an upsetting moment, pointing to the merciless market in moving human beings that’s been fueled by ever-tightening immigration laws. American border control turns out to be good for the smuggling business. Cartels and gangs have seized their piece of the action, too, offering “protection” from violence often generated by gangs themselves. “A major component of smuggling is extracting as much as possible from clients and their families,” De León writes — in other words, “fleecing people.” In this way, smuggling, he says, is a symptom of global inequality and therefore of “capitalism itself.” Smuggling captures some of capitalism’s cruelest features — ruthlessness and profiteering — like a magnifying mirror.

“Human smuggling is exploitative and violent,” De León writes. “It also cannot be stopped.” He points to the “monstrous injustices” that drive demand for the guías’ services, including relentless poverty, the drug trade, climate change and gang violence. Smuggling, he says, “is not the problem.” But as his own book memorably recounts, in a world with no shortage of problems, it’s nevertheless one of them.

SOLDIERS AND KINGS : Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling | By Jason De León | Viking | 367 pp. | $32

A previous version of this review misstated the nature of the crime committed by a smuggler named Kingston, which led to his deportation to Honduras. Kingston used the .22 to pistol-whip someone’s face; he did not use the gun to shoot the person in the face.

How we handle corrections

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

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Tamron Hall's new book is a compelling thriller, but leaves us wanting more

Jordan just wants some answers.

Tamron Hall's "Watch Where They Hide" (William Morrow, 246 pp, ★★½ out of four), out now, is a sequel to her 2021 mystery/thriller novel " As The Wicked Watch."

Both books follow Jordan Manning, a Chicago TV reporter who works the crime beat. In this installment, it’s 2009, and two years have passed since the events in the previous book. If you haven’t read that first novel yet, no worries, it's not required reading.

Jordan is investigating what happened to Marla Hancock, a missing mother of two from Indianapolis who may have traveled into Chicago. The police don’t seem to be particularly concerned about her disappearance, nor do her husband or best friend. But Marla’s sister, Shelly, is worried and reaches out to Jordan after seeing her on TV reporting on a domestic case.

As Jordan looks into Marla’s relationships and the circumstances surrounding the last moments anyone saw her, she becomes convinced something bad occurred. She has questions, and she wants the police to put more effort into the search, or even to just admit the mom is truly missing. The mystery deepens, taking sudden turns when confusing chat room messages and surveillance videos surface. What really happened to Marla?

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The stories Jordan pursues have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Hall weaves in themes of race, class and gender bias as Jordan navigates her career ambitions and just living life as a young Black woman.

Hall, a longtime broadcast journalist and talk show host, is no stranger to television or investigative journalism and brings a rawness to Jordan Manning and a realness to the newsroom and news coverage in her novels.

Jordan is brilliant at her job, but also something of a vigilante.

Where no real journalist would dare to do what Jordan Manning does, Hall gives her main character no such ethical boundaries. Jordan often goes rogue on the cases she covers, looking into leads and pursuing suspects – more police investigator than investigative journalist.

Sometimes this works: Jordan is a fascinating protagonist, she’s bold, smart, stylish and unapologetically Black. She cares about her community and her work, and she wants to see justice done.

But sometimes it doesn’t. The plot is derailed at times by too much explanation for things that don’t matter and too little on the ones that do, muddying up understanding Jordan’s motivations.

The sudden narration changes from Jordan’s first person to a third-person Shelly, but only for a few chapters across the book, is jarring and perhaps unnecessary.

There are a lot of characters between this book and the previous one, often written about in the sort of painstaking detail that only a legacy journalist can provide, but the most interesting people in Jordan’s life – her news editor, her best friend, her police detective friend who saves her numerous times, her steadfast cameraman – are the ones who may appear on the page but don’t get as much context or time to shine.

The mysteries are fun, sure, but I’m left wishing we could spend more time unraveling Jordan, learning why she feels called to her craft in this way, and why the people who trust her or love her, do so. It's just like a journalist to be right in front of us, telling us about someone else's journey but not much of her own.

When the books focus like a sharpened lens on Jordan, those are the best parts. She’s the one we came to watch.

A generative AI reset: Rewiring to turn potential into value in 2024

It’s time for a generative AI (gen AI) reset. The initial enthusiasm and flurry of activity in 2023 is giving way to second thoughts and recalibrations as companies realize that capturing gen AI’s enormous potential value is harder than expected .

With 2024 shaping up to be the year for gen AI to prove its value, companies should keep in mind the hard lessons learned with digital and AI transformations: competitive advantage comes from building organizational and technological capabilities to broadly innovate, deploy, and improve solutions at scale—in effect, rewiring the business  for distributed digital and AI innovation.

About QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey

QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, helps companies transform using the power of technology, technical expertise, and industry experts. With thousands of practitioners at QuantumBlack (data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers) and McKinsey (industry and domain experts), we are working to solve the world’s most important AI challenges. QuantumBlack Labs is our center of technology development and client innovation, which has been driving cutting-edge advancements and developments in AI through locations across the globe.

Companies looking to score early wins with gen AI should move quickly. But those hoping that gen AI offers a shortcut past the tough—and necessary—organizational surgery are likely to meet with disappointing results. Launching pilots is (relatively) easy; getting pilots to scale and create meaningful value is hard because they require a broad set of changes to the way work actually gets done.

Let’s briefly look at what this has meant for one Pacific region telecommunications company. The company hired a chief data and AI officer with a mandate to “enable the organization to create value with data and AI.” The chief data and AI officer worked with the business to develop the strategic vision and implement the road map for the use cases. After a scan of domains (that is, customer journeys or functions) and use case opportunities across the enterprise, leadership prioritized the home-servicing/maintenance domain to pilot and then scale as part of a larger sequencing of initiatives. They targeted, in particular, the development of a gen AI tool to help dispatchers and service operators better predict the types of calls and parts needed when servicing homes.

Leadership put in place cross-functional product teams with shared objectives and incentives to build the gen AI tool. As part of an effort to upskill the entire enterprise to better work with data and gen AI tools, they also set up a data and AI academy, which the dispatchers and service operators enrolled in as part of their training. To provide the technology and data underpinnings for gen AI, the chief data and AI officer also selected a large language model (LLM) and cloud provider that could meet the needs of the domain as well as serve other parts of the enterprise. The chief data and AI officer also oversaw the implementation of a data architecture so that the clean and reliable data (including service histories and inventory databases) needed to build the gen AI tool could be delivered quickly and responsibly.

Creating value beyond the hype

Let’s deliver on the promise of technology from strategy to scale.

Our book Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI (Wiley, June 2023) provides a detailed manual on the six capabilities needed to deliver the kind of broad change that harnesses digital and AI technology. In this article, we will explore how to extend each of those capabilities to implement a successful gen AI program at scale. While recognizing that these are still early days and that there is much more to learn, our experience has shown that breaking open the gen AI opportunity requires companies to rewire how they work in the following ways.

Figure out where gen AI copilots can give you a real competitive advantage

The broad excitement around gen AI and its relative ease of use has led to a burst of experimentation across organizations. Most of these initiatives, however, won’t generate a competitive advantage. One bank, for example, bought tens of thousands of GitHub Copilot licenses, but since it didn’t have a clear sense of how to work with the technology, progress was slow. Another unfocused effort we often see is when companies move to incorporate gen AI into their customer service capabilities. Customer service is a commodity capability, not part of the core business, for most companies. While gen AI might help with productivity in such cases, it won’t create a competitive advantage.

To create competitive advantage, companies should first understand the difference between being a “taker” (a user of available tools, often via APIs and subscription services), a “shaper” (an integrator of available models with proprietary data), and a “maker” (a builder of LLMs). For now, the maker approach is too expensive for most companies, so the sweet spot for businesses is implementing a taker model for productivity improvements while building shaper applications for competitive advantage.

Much of gen AI’s near-term value is closely tied to its ability to help people do their current jobs better. In this way, gen AI tools act as copilots that work side by side with an employee, creating an initial block of code that a developer can adapt, for example, or drafting a requisition order for a new part that a maintenance worker in the field can review and submit (see sidebar “Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes”). This means companies should be focusing on where copilot technology can have the biggest impact on their priority programs.

Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes

• “Taker” copilots help real estate customers sift through property options and find the most promising one, write code for a developer, and summarize investor transcripts.
• “Shaper” copilots provide recommendations to sales reps for upselling customers by connecting generative AI tools to customer relationship management systems, financial systems, and customer behavior histories; create virtual assistants to personalize treatments for patients; and recommend solutions for maintenance workers based on historical data.
• “Maker” copilots are foundation models that lab scientists at pharmaceutical companies can use to find and test new and better drugs more quickly.

Some industrial companies, for example, have identified maintenance as a critical domain for their business. Reviewing maintenance reports and spending time with workers on the front lines can help determine where a gen AI copilot could make a big difference, such as in identifying issues with equipment failures quickly and early on. A gen AI copilot can also help identify root causes of truck breakdowns and recommend resolutions much more quickly than usual, as well as act as an ongoing source for best practices or standard operating procedures.

The challenge with copilots is figuring out how to generate revenue from increased productivity. In the case of customer service centers, for example, companies can stop recruiting new agents and use attrition to potentially achieve real financial gains. Defining the plans for how to generate revenue from the increased productivity up front, therefore, is crucial to capturing the value.

Upskill the talent you have but be clear about the gen-AI-specific skills you need

By now, most companies have a decent understanding of the technical gen AI skills they need, such as model fine-tuning, vector database administration, prompt engineering, and context engineering. In many cases, these are skills that you can train your existing workforce to develop. Those with existing AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities have a strong head start. Data engineers, for example, can learn multimodal processing and vector database management, MLOps (ML operations) engineers can extend their skills to LLMOps (LLM operations), and data scientists can develop prompt engineering, bias detection, and fine-tuning skills.

A sample of new generative AI skills needed

The following are examples of new skills needed for the successful deployment of generative AI tools:

• data scientist:
• prompt engineering
• in-context learning
• bias detection
• pattern identification
• reinforcement learning from human feedback
• hyperparameter/large language model fine-tuning; transfer learning
• data engineer:
• data wrangling and data warehousing
• data pipeline construction
• multimodal processing
• vector database management

The learning process can take two to three months to get to a decent level of competence because of the complexities in learning what various LLMs can and can’t do and how best to use them. The coders need to gain experience building software, testing, and validating answers, for example. It took one financial-services company three months to train its best data scientists to a high level of competence. While courses and documentation are available—many LLM providers have boot camps for developers—we have found that the most effective way to build capabilities at scale is through apprenticeship, training people to then train others, and building communities of practitioners. Rotating experts through teams to train others, scheduling regular sessions for people to share learnings, and hosting biweekly documentation review sessions are practices that have proven successful in building communities of practitioners (see sidebar “A sample of new generative AI skills needed”).

It’s important to bear in mind that successful gen AI skills are about more than coding proficiency. Our experience in developing our own gen AI platform, Lilli , showed us that the best gen AI technical talent has design skills to uncover where to focus solutions, contextual understanding to ensure the most relevant and high-quality answers are generated, collaboration skills to work well with knowledge experts (to test and validate answers and develop an appropriate curation approach), strong forensic skills to figure out causes of breakdowns (is the issue the data, the interpretation of the user’s intent, the quality of metadata on embeddings, or something else?), and anticipation skills to conceive of and plan for possible outcomes and to put the right kind of tracking into their code. A pure coder who doesn’t intrinsically have these skills may not be as useful a team member.

While current upskilling is largely based on a “learn on the job” approach, we see a rapid market emerging for people who have learned these skills over the past year. That skill growth is moving quickly. GitHub reported that developers were working on gen AI projects “in big numbers,” and that 65,000 public gen AI projects were created on its platform in 2023—a jump of almost 250 percent over the previous year. If your company is just starting its gen AI journey, you could consider hiring two or three senior engineers who have built a gen AI shaper product for their companies. This could greatly accelerate your efforts.

Form a centralized team to establish standards that enable responsible scaling

To ensure that all parts of the business can scale gen AI capabilities, centralizing competencies is a natural first move. The critical focus for this central team will be to develop and put in place protocols and standards to support scale, ensuring that teams can access models while also minimizing risk and containing costs. The team’s work could include, for example, procuring models and prescribing ways to access them, developing standards for data readiness, setting up approved prompt libraries, and allocating resources.

While developing Lilli, our team had its mind on scale when it created an open plug-in architecture and setting standards for how APIs should function and be built.  They developed standardized tooling and infrastructure where teams could securely experiment and access a GPT LLM , a gateway with preapproved APIs that teams could access, and a self-serve developer portal. Our goal is that this approach, over time, can help shift “Lilli as a product” (that a handful of teams use to build specific solutions) to “Lilli as a platform” (that teams across the enterprise can access to build other products).

For teams developing gen AI solutions, squad composition will be similar to AI teams but with data engineers and data scientists with gen AI experience and more contributors from risk management, compliance, and legal functions. The general idea of staffing squads with resources that are federated from the different expertise areas will not change, but the skill composition of a gen-AI-intensive squad will.

Set up the technology architecture to scale

Building a gen AI model is often relatively straightforward, but making it fully operational at scale is a different matter entirely. We’ve seen engineers build a basic chatbot in a week, but releasing a stable, accurate, and compliant version that scales can take four months. That’s why, our experience shows, the actual model costs may be less than 10 to 15 percent of the total costs of the solution.

Building for scale doesn’t mean building a new technology architecture. But it does mean focusing on a few core decisions that simplify and speed up processes without breaking the bank. Three such decisions stand out:

• Focus on reusing your technology. Reusing code can increase the development speed of gen AI use cases by 30 to 50 percent. One good approach is simply creating a source for approved tools, code, and components. A financial-services company, for example, created a library of production-grade tools, which had been approved by both the security and legal teams, and made them available in a library for teams to use. More important is taking the time to identify and build those capabilities that are common across the most priority use cases. The same financial-services company, for example, identified three components that could be reused for more than 100 identified use cases. By building those first, they were able to generate a significant portion of the code base for all the identified use cases—essentially giving every application a big head start.
• Focus the architecture on enabling efficient connections between gen AI models and internal systems. For gen AI models to work effectively in the shaper archetype, they need access to a business’s data and applications. Advances in integration and orchestration frameworks have significantly reduced the effort required to make those connections. But laying out what those integrations are and how to enable them is critical to ensure these models work efficiently and to avoid the complexity that creates technical debt  (the “tax” a company pays in terms of time and resources needed to redress existing technology issues). Chief information officers and chief technology officers can define reference architectures and integration standards for their organizations. Key elements should include a model hub, which contains trained and approved models that can be provisioned on demand; standard APIs that act as bridges connecting gen AI models to applications or data; and context management and caching, which speed up processing by providing models with relevant information from enterprise data sources.
• Build up your testing and quality assurance capabilities. Our own experience building Lilli taught us to prioritize testing over development. Our team invested in not only developing testing protocols for each stage of development but also aligning the entire team so that, for example, it was clear who specifically needed to sign off on each stage of the process. This slowed down initial development but sped up the overall delivery pace and quality by cutting back on errors and the time needed to fix mistakes.

Ensure data quality and focus on unstructured data to fuel your models

The ability of a business to generate and scale value from gen AI models will depend on how well it takes advantage of its own data. As with technology, targeted upgrades to existing data architecture  are needed to maximize the future strategic benefits of gen AI:

• Be targeted in ramping up your data quality and data augmentation efforts. While data quality has always been an important issue, the scale and scope of data that gen AI models can use—especially unstructured data—has made this issue much more consequential. For this reason, it’s critical to get the data foundations right, from clarifying decision rights to defining clear data processes to establishing taxonomies so models can access the data they need. The companies that do this well tie their data quality and augmentation efforts to the specific AI/gen AI application and use case—you don’t need this data foundation to extend to every corner of the enterprise. This could mean, for example, developing a new data repository for all equipment specifications and reported issues to better support maintenance copilot applications.
• Understand what value is locked into your unstructured data. Most organizations have traditionally focused their data efforts on structured data (values that can be organized in tables, such as prices and features). But the real value from LLMs comes from their ability to work with unstructured data (for example, PowerPoint slides, videos, and text). Companies can map out which unstructured data sources are most valuable and establish metadata tagging standards so models can process the data and teams can find what they need (tagging is particularly important to help companies remove data from models as well, if necessary). Be creative in thinking about data opportunities. Some companies, for example, are interviewing senior employees as they retire and feeding that captured institutional knowledge into an LLM to help improve their copilot performance.
• Optimize to lower costs at scale. There is often as much as a tenfold difference between what companies pay for data and what they could be paying if they optimized their data infrastructure and underlying costs. This issue often stems from companies scaling their proofs of concept without optimizing their data approach. Two costs generally stand out. One is storage costs arising from companies uploading terabytes of data into the cloud and wanting that data available 24/7. In practice, companies rarely need more than 10 percent of their data to have that level of availability, and accessing the rest over a 24- or 48-hour period is a much cheaper option. The other costs relate to computation with models that require on-call access to thousands of processors to run. This is especially the case when companies are building their own models (the maker archetype) but also when they are using pretrained models and running them with their own data and use cases (the shaper archetype). Companies could take a close look at how they can optimize computation costs on cloud platforms—for instance, putting some models in a queue to run when processors aren’t being used (such as when Americans go to bed and consumption of computing services like Netflix decreases) is a much cheaper option.

Build trust and reusability to drive adoption and scale

Because many people have concerns about gen AI, the bar on explaining how these tools work is much higher than for most solutions. People who use the tools want to know how they work, not just what they do. So it’s important to invest extra time and money to build trust by ensuring model accuracy and making it easy to check answers.

One insurance company, for example, created a gen AI tool to help manage claims. As part of the tool, it listed all the guardrails that had been put in place, and for each answer provided a link to the sentence or page of the relevant policy documents. The company also used an LLM to generate many variations of the same question to ensure answer consistency. These steps, among others, were critical to helping end users build trust in the tool.

Part of the training for maintenance teams using a gen AI tool should be to help them understand the limitations of models and how best to get the right answers. That includes teaching workers strategies to get to the best answer as fast as possible by starting with broad questions then narrowing them down. This provides the model with more context, and it also helps remove any bias of the people who might think they know the answer already. Having model interfaces that look and feel the same as existing tools also helps users feel less pressured to learn something new each time a new application is introduced.

Getting to scale means that businesses will need to stop building one-off solutions that are hard to use for other similar use cases. One global energy and materials company, for example, has established ease of reuse as a key requirement for all gen AI models, and has found in early iterations that 50 to 60 percent of its components can be reused. This means setting standards for developing gen AI assets (for example, prompts and context) that can be easily reused for other cases.

While many of the risk issues relating to gen AI are evolutions of discussions that were already brewing—for instance, data privacy, security, bias risk, job displacement, and intellectual property protection—gen AI has greatly expanded that risk landscape. Just 21 percent of companies reporting AI adoption say they have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies.

Similarly, a set of tests for AI/gen AI solutions should be established to demonstrate that data privacy, debiasing, and intellectual property protection are respected. Some organizations, in fact, are proposing to release models accompanied with documentation that details their performance characteristics. Documenting your decisions and rationales can be particularly helpful in conversations with regulators.

In some ways, this article is premature—so much is changing that we’ll likely have a profoundly different understanding of gen AI and its capabilities in a year’s time. But the core truths of finding value and driving change will still apply. How well companies have learned those lessons may largely determine how successful they’ll be in capturing that value.

The authors wish to thank Michael Chui, Juan Couto, Ben Ellencweig, Josh Gartner, Bryce Hall, Holger Harreis, Phil Hudelson, Suzana Iacob, Sid Kamath, Neerav Kingsland, Kitti Lakner, Robert Levin, Matej Macak, Lapo Mori, Alex Peluffo, Aldo Rosales, Erik Roth, Abdul Wahab Shaikh, and Stephen Xu for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Barr Seitz, an editorial director in the New York office.

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Liberty After Freedom: A History of Article 21, Due Process and the Constitution of India by Rohan J Alva, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2022; pp 312,  ` 599.

Rohan J Alva’s book titled Liberty A fter Freedom: A History of Article 21, D ue Process and the Constitu tion of India is a welcome addition to un derstanding the broad history of the Indian republic from the lens of Article 21. The book is an exercise in revisiting  the political–legal history of the speech es and amendments made in the Constitu ent Assembly Debates, which played a crucial role in the creation and evolution of Article 21. This book is driven by the goal of making the history of Article 21 more accessible to lay readers. Considering Granville Austin and Abhin av Chandrachud’s respective books on due process, Liberty After Freedom is a  welcome addition to the genre of books on the jurisprudence of citizenship and rights in India. 

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What you need to know about The Three-Body Problem before watching 3 Body Problem

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With Netflix’s 3 Body Problem imminent, you might naturally be intrigued by The Three-Body Problem , the science fiction novel by Cixin Liu.

First of all: I cannot explain why the show is 3 Body Problem and the book is The Three-Body Problem . Frankly, this decision drives me bananas. But it does make distinguishing the two in articles like this one easier, and as you’ll soon see, things are going to get complicated enough as is.

What is The Three-Body Problem about?

The simple version is that it’s a story about humanity’s first contact with an alien species. What makes it special is that it’s a very odd first contact story, centering on a wildly immersive VR video game and how it may be connected to the mysterious deaths of the world’s leading scientists. First contact is the light at the end of the story’s tunnel: read the back of the book and you know it’s coming, but how it happens is something you discover by reading.

Why is it such a big deal?

First serialized in China in 2006, The Three-Body Problem quickly racked up accolades upon its 2014 English debut, becoming the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. But unusually for such a hard sci-fi novel, The Three-Body Problem quickly escaped the orbit of speculative fiction circles and received glowing write-ups in mainstream press outlets like The New York Times , NPR , and, famously, a shoutout from President Barack Obama . Bob’s Burgers even did a Three-Body Problem episode . It was a big thing!

It’s also a work that some would call unadaptable: The Three-Body Problem has some weird shit going on in its VR game and eventually sets up a conflict that may or may not span centuries.

Remind me what you mean by ‘hard’ sci-fi.

The Three-Body Problem is a brainy book that is very committed to elaborating on the work of a lot of smart characters solving very opaque mysteries. This does not mean it’s impenetrable to people uninterested in becoming conversant in astrophysics, but it does mean there’s quite a bit of what I call “process porn,” focused primarily (but not exclusively) on existing and/or plausible technology. For the most satisfying version of that, consider films like Arrival or even Spotlight (a great movie for making spreadsheets thrilling). How well The Three-Body Problem ’s take on it works for you will depend on how much you connect with translator (and very good novelist in his own right ) Ken Liu’s interpretation of Cixin Liu’s prose.

It helps that the book begins vividly in the past, during China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s — telling a small, personal tragedy that reverberates throughout the first novel as it reaches into the present day and beyond. With that human core in place, it’s easier to get lost in The Three-Body Problem ’s trippy mysteries, and grasp their shocking consequences.

I’m looking up characters from the book and can’t find many in the show. What’s up with that?

Part of what the Netflix adaptation does is relocate a big chunk of the action from China to London, which means lots of changes that ripple outward. Characters are race- and genderbent or reworked and given different names, which makes finding one-to-one analogues for some characters very difficult. But there are very practical concerns that also needed to be addressed, according to the showrunners, and these changes account for that.

“The characters in the book are all spread out in a way, but they don’t know each other, and they don’t connect with each other. Which works really well in a novel, [where] you get inside someone’s head,” co-creator D.B. Weiss told Polygon at a recent press event. “And in television — it’s hard to think of a television show about people who don’t know each other and never meet. Television is about people who know each other, who have strong feelings about each other, interacting with other people about whom they have strong feelings. So we kind of needed to make that happen.”

How much of The Three-Body Problem will 3 Body Problem season 1 adapt?

Pardon? But what if there’s another season?

Oh, there are more books. The Three-Body Problem is the first in a trilogy, known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is actually an adaptation of the entire trilogy, folding in the novel’s two sequels — The Dark Forest and Death’s End — into its narrative. The first season of the show will cover The Three-Body Problem but will also introduce threads from later books. It’s a comprehensive adaptation, not a piecemeal one.

So you mean it’s done? There’s an end?

Yes, I do mean that. Don’t worry; while David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are most notorious for what happened when the former Game of Thrones showrunners ran out of track laid by their source material, that problem is not present here. They’re also not the only ones in charge, thanks to co-creator Alexander Woo, who has previously worked on excellent series like Manhattan and Wonderfalls . 3 Body Problem will live or die by the adaptation choices made, not for lack of material.

3 Body Problem will premiere on Netflix on March 22.

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