We open with Bonds, an interpolated novel by an invented character named Harold Vanner. There’s major pleasure here too, in this modifying form with its layers of escalating verisimilitude. Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, my favorite novel of 2021, uses a similar escalating concept, but inverts it, starting with non-fiction and moving toward pure invention. These parts will fractally modify and correct themselves as Trust moves from renditions of (1) fiction to (2) spurious note taking for a puff book defending the source subject of the fiction to (3) “authentic” ex post facto non-fiction about the spurious note taking for the puff book to (4) a morphine-addled diary by one of the subjects of the fiction. Trust is told in four parts, with the majority of the action set in 1920s and 1930s New York.
To go any further necessitates breaking down the structure of the novel. Though I quite like Trust, and recommend you read it, it’s a book whose own sparseness feels mismatched with its gilded action, and a book which may be just a touch too tidy for its own good. Diaz’s debut novel, In the Distance, was a wonder: a western remix with a surreal journey across America from west to east, filled with sparse reveries of open spaces.
Perhaps when we’re excited for a book, we hold it to too high a standard. But: a nesting doll novel that features an unreliable sequence of interconnected narrators, multiple iterations of 1930’s Swiss sanatoriums, an interpolated novella that’s also a mild pastiche of early 20 th century American literature, copious research in the New York Public Library, an examination of the financial structures that undergird our world, and a recurring Bluebeard myth? It’s as if Hernan Diaz’s latest novel, Trust, was built in a lab to hit my pleasure nodes.Īnd yet, I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing here, like a gorgeous cut of meat that needed a touch more seasoning and a bit more sear. It’s a rare thing to fall in love at first conceit.
0 kommentar(er)
