A "Best Book" that deserves the title

I read Hernan Diaz's novel Trust because it was on a recent New York Times list of the best books of the 21st Century and if you can't trust the New York Times, who can you trust? It also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so there's that too.

Trust's publisher's describes the novel by writing, "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."

It's in four sections and I read the first 125-page section and wondered what was wrong with me. It purports to be a—granted—well-written and interesting short novel titled Bonds, but not so special that I thought it a best book of the year. Good, but not best.

The second section is an incomplete. fragmentary 1938 memoir of Andrew Bevel who is really, really pissed at the author and publisher of Bonds because the author fictionalized Bevel's life and marriage and portrayed it all wrong. Andrew wants to publish a memoir that sets the record straight. His wife was not instrumental in his phenomenal success. She died of natural causes not because Andrew allowed some Austrian quack attempt an experimental cure that killed her.

The third section is a contemporary memoir of a writer who, when she was a young woman in the late 1930s, Andrew hired to write the memoir we've just read.

The fourth section, thankfully, does not tie up all the loose ends or answer all the reader's questions. 

Trust "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." Both "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"—quotes from the publisher with which I agree.

It took me a while to see what Diaz was doing, but once I did my admiration and fascinating grew. Tryst can be read as a "Rashomon" story—four characters describing the same events and their meanings differently. Which one is "true"? I suspect that how you answer when you've finished Trust is how you view wealth, financiers, women, memoir, fiction, and more. 

I don't know if I would call Trust the best novel of the year (I haven't read all the year's novels), but it is right up there with the best I've read.