Hernan Diaz: Trust

Succession, sans caricatures of misbehaving heirs like Shiv, Kendall, Roman, and Connor. But Logan Roy who has bent reality around his fortune? Logan Roy, the giant, who looks at people as economic units and pygmies that form a market? I see him here, along with the tragedies that come with capitalism. 

Trust begins with a novella called Bonds. That the two words are significant in the realm of both relationships and finance makes for a clever opening to a story about marital and familial bonds and the American economy in the early 20th century.

This is a nesting doll in book form, with each section revealing a different narrator, and consequently, a different version of the previous story. Within this brilliant play on literary structure, Hernan Diaz leads us to question the narratives we bank on and who controls them.

What I would like to highlight, however, is the often overlooked but none-too-subtle criticism of how women have been usually portrayed in literature and of their consignment to the peripheries of history; and while it has been said that this is about the equivalence of money and power and how the powerful can easily manipulate narratives, I choose to see this as a double-edged sword that shows how the powerful can easily be threatened by the sheer force of a story. 

And this book? Powerful. Truly deserving of the Pulitzer.