Trust – whom, what, and why?
What does it mean to trust?
Making the title of your novel a single word, one with layers of possible meaning, might be a provocation to readers. This is philosophy, dear reader, not just a story.
Making the underlying story one with the exterior backdrop of Wall Street and the Swiss Alps and the interior landscape of – what is it, madness, or something else? – immediately intensifies the challenge.
But Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust, doesn’t stop there. The book – which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2023 – also confronts us with – smashes us head on into – a structure that contains:
a novel within the novel;
a memoire that masks more than it uncovers;
another memoire by another voice that seems to clarify all; before
notes toward yet another memoire.
Let’s think out loud, first, about the challenge that the title hurls at us; and second, about how the structure that gives us no place to run.
Trust is a cornerstone of society. Generalized trust makes it easier to conduct transactions with strangers. You know there are institutions that can enforce good conduct, but you also know you probably won’t have to rely on them, because most people, most of time, just follow the rules. Generalized trust leads to economic prosperity, as Francis Fukuyama (1995) and others have argued. Without it you can only rely on those you know, maybe only on family members, and maybe not all of them.
Trust isn’t rational. Lawrence Becker (1996) calls it a “noncognitive” path to feeling secure about the motives of others. It involves expecting others to think and act the way you do, to reciprocate even if – especially if – it’s not obviously in the other’s interest to do so. Although trust and its counterpart – trustworthiness – are often viewed as having a moral character, philosophers like Russell Hardin (1996) contend that trust itself is amoral, perhaps a way of coping with complexity and the inaction it fosters. Because institutions – law, regulation, custom and practice – reinforce the trustworthiness of others in economic affairs, they bolster trust. But in noneconomic matters, the path to trust is less obvious.
So, what is Diaz getting at by calling this novel of Wall Street, families, the Swiss Alps, and illness Trust?
The novel Diaz writes revolves around events in the life of a reclusive financier in early twentieth century New York. He lives for work, and work is the creation of wealth, principally his own. He does so through the trust that others place in the investment trusts he has created.
Too busy for love, and too bristly to attract it, he eventually marries a woman many years his junior. She too is a recluse but with a propensity to mathematics and a deep appreciation of music, art and literature. They fit well together, it seems, though in lovelorn but trusting way.
He has an uncanny knack of buying low and selling high, amassing a small fortune. It soon becomes a gigantic one – when he liquidates his investments and then sells the market short just as Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, approaches. She falls ill, however, and dies.
The novel-within-the-novel, in Part 1, fictionalizes this outline, using different names, in an account that sees the wife descend into madness before she then disappears from a sanitorium. It calls to mind, but only indirectly, Thomas Mann’s classic novel, The Magic Mountain (original: Der Zauberberg), an archetype of what literary theorists call the novel of ideas. One thing is clear: This work asks to be on the Pulitzer Prize circuit.
The “real-life” (but fictional) financier, in Part 2, takes umbrage at this slander and plots revenge with a memoire that ignores the novel but will set the record straight. It will give a trustworthy account of his life and wife, and in so doing eradicate the damage of the mere piece of fiction. Trust will be restored.
Part 3 is the story told again, decades later, by the now middle-aged version of a young woman, daughter of an Italian immigrant anarchist father. The financier hired her to take dictation and type up his memoire for the publisher, ensuring that his late wife’s reputation will be restored and her legacy to the arts preserved. Part 4 is then the wife’s account – notes she has sketched of her own actions and those of her financier husband.
Whose account do we trust? Each actor – the “novelist,” the financier, his scribe, his wife – has an axe to grind. The economic outcomes of the actions of the financier are all roughly the same: They correspond to each other and cohere to the facts (if we can ever call anything a fact) that we “know” of the Roaring Twenties, the Crash of 1929, and the Great Depression that followed. The generalized mistrust the Crash engendered and the stabilization that new institutions created slowly re-established something like generalized trust – at least in the economic sphere.
But can we trust anything else in these accounts? On relationships between the characters, do the account correspond well to each other? How do we know at what level they cohere with other, or if at all? These sorts of theories of truth – that other big and unspoken concept in this novel – may leave us rooting for one character or another and then switch our allegiances as we move from Part to Part, tale to tale.
But this is a novel. How can we trust a writer of fiction, a Hernan Diaz?
Literary theorists might slap the label “metafiction” on this book, but don’t let that spoil your pleasure in reading it. In its Rashomon-like form, this book with its four stories lets us live for a while in Gilded Age New York and in the sublimity of the magic mountains. We get to learn about the inner workings of finance – with its investment trusts and anti-trust regulations. We get to live for a while in a grand house on the Upper East Side of New York, watch skyscrapers rise over the city, and see experiments in advanced medicine unfold.
This too is a novel, a fiction, an untruth that might just reveal something about ourselves. It shows how we trust and how our trust, once established, is confounded. Whom do we trust? What? And why?
Becker, L. C. (1996). Trust as Noncognitive Security about Motives. Ethics, 107(1), 43-61. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/233696
Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press.
Hardin, R. (1996). Trustworthiness. Ethics, 107(1), 26-42. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/233695