01

Dua’s Monthly Read

Service95
Book CLub

Trust

byHERNAN
DIAZ

Discussion Guide
March 2024

Discussion Guide Service95

 02
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer

Prize-winning and New York
Times bestselling author of
two novels translated into
35 languages.
Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times
bestselling author of two novels translated into 35 languages.
His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer
and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2018. His second novel, Trust,
is the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2022,
Trust was one of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books, won the
Kirkus Prize and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel
is currently being developed into a limited series for HBO,
produced by Kate Winslet. He is the recipient of the 2023 John
Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
a Whiting Award (2019) and the William Saroyan International
Prize (2018). When Diaz was two year’s old, his parents fled
Argentina for Sweden after a military coup. He returned

TRUST to Argentina aged nine, and has lived in Brooklyn for 25 years.

Synopsis
Benjamin Rask is a legendary Wall Street
tycoon; his wife, Helen, is the daughter of
eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have
risen to the very top of seemingly endless
wealth in 1920s New York. As this decade
of excess and speculation draws to an
end, at what cost have they acquired their
immense fortune? This is the mystery at the
centre of ‘Bonds’, a successful 1937 novel.
Yet there are other versions of this tale of
privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust elegantly puts four

competing narratives into conversation.
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 buried in the
human heart when power manipulates facts.

Discussion Guide Service95

 03

Why we loved it
“My March Monthly Read is Trust by Hernan Diaz. This book made my head
spin! Set in New York City in the 1920s and ’30s, the story of a Manhattan
financier and his high-society wife is told through four ‘books’ – a novel,
a manuscript, a memoir and a journal. But which version should you trust?
Is there even one true reality? As we sift our way through these competing
narratives, Diaz serves us clues and red herrings in equal measure. We know
we are being gamed, but we’re not sure exactly which character is gaming us.
While each reader will draw their own conclusion when they reach the end
of this complex and thrilling book, what is never disputed is the ease with
which money and power can bend reality itself. I was obsessed, and
you might just be too”

— Dua Lipa

“MOST OF US PREFER TO BELIEVE WE ARE

THE ACTIVE SUBJECTS OF OUR VICTORIES BUT
ONLY THE PASSIVE OBJECTS OF OUR DEFEATS.
WE TRIUMPH, BUT IT IS NOT REALLY WE WHO
FAIL - WE ARE RUINED BY FORCES BEYOND OUR
CONTROL.”

What others say

“ Trust creates a great portrait of
New York across an entire century
of change... 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”
“Like four exquisite dioramas, “A sublime, richly layered novel.
Diaz has set up all these stories A story within a story within a story”
with great precision to present two
fundamental questions: Why do we – Roxane Gay, author of
tell stories? And at what cost are Bad Feminist
those stories told?”
– Boston Globe

– The Guardian

Discussion Guide Service95

 04

Trust, The Roaring Twenties and the Wall

Street Crash
At the heart of the novel Trust by Hernan Diaz
is the myth of the ‘American Dream’: the idea
that anyone can make a fortune, whatever their
background. It’s a myth because it disguises a
heavily unbalanced class system, where wealth
– originally obtained often by exploitation
of African slaves, or land expropriated from
Indigenous Americans – endures down
privileged generations. As each new ruling class
increases the wealth of a few, it tells itself the
same story: that its wealth was fairly won, and
that its privilege serves the interests of everyone.

The hollowness of this myth is exposed by

Diaz’s fictional character Andrew Bevel,
a financier who achieves untold wealth in the New York stock market of the Roaring Twenties. This post-First World War
era of consumerism, the Jazz Age, Art Deco and cinema was paralleled by an immense boom on Wall Street.

Before the Roaring Twenties was the Gilded Age, dominated by ‘robber baron’ industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie
(steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railways), and John D Rockefeller (oil). Their money was on public display: the Vanderbilts
took over an entire stretch of Fifth Avenue in New York by building palatial mansions between 51st and 57th Streets, a
stretch that became known as Vanderbilt Row.

Because of the power and wealth of their owners, trusts – which were corporate groups in modern industries like oil and
railways – became politically controversial, and early 20th-century US presidents such as William McKinley and Teddy
Roosevelt pursued ‘trust-busting’ populist agendas. US Congress passed ‘anti-trust’ acts in 1890 and 1914 to promote fairer
competition.

Standard Oil was the pre-eminent trust, making its chairman John D Rockefeller perhaps the wealthiest American of all
time. It was broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, but such was its power that Standard Oil’s successor companies
became titans in their own right: Exxon formed out of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Mobil out of Standard Oil of New York,
Chevron out of Standard Oil of California, to name just a few. In Trust the novel, the character Ida Partenza shows parallels
to the real historical figure Ida Tarbell, a ‘muckraking’ journalist who devoted years to researching and exposing the
excesses of Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

Andrew Bevel’s character may also owe something to John Pierpont Morgan, still famous today as the original JP Morgan.
The outsize power of private bankers such as Morgan in the US economy led to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913
– before that time the United States had no central bank. There were women stockbrokers in the 1920s, some surprisingly
successful, but they have been largely neglected in historical accounts.

The boom of the Roaring Twenties ended suddenly with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, as investors rushed to sell overvalued
stocks before they became worthless. The crash also affected ordinary people, who often bought shares for 10% of their
value and borrowed the rest, using the shares themselves as collateral for the loan. This worked until the value of the shares
plummeted, driving widespread bankruptcy.

Following the Crash came the Great Depression, when a fifth of working-age Americans were unemployed. Bankers such as
Andrew Bevel became targets of popular hatred as they were suspected of profiting from the miseries of others. Banking is
an industry built on trust – millions of Americans had trusted these men with their money, and now they had nothing.

Discussion Guide Service95


Book Club
Questions
Here are a few questions to help you think about
the book from different angles, whether you do
that on your own, discuss them with your friends
or take them to your local or virtual book club.
1. Four distinct narratives make up Trust. Which
do you believe?
2. “He viewed capital as an antiseptically living
thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls
ill, and may die.” Was it easy to read a novel
about money-making?
3 Did Trust make you think differently about
history? How the past is recorded, shaped and
retold?
4. What does the title, Trust, signify?
5. Hernan Diaz has said, “Voice – who is given
one and who is silenced – is a major issue in
Trust.” Who has a voice in this novel? Who is
silenced, and how does Diaz subvert this in
the narrative?
Discussion Guide
05
6. How does Trust illuminate how women have
been categorised, remembered and told?
7. Ida’s father asks, “And how is reality funded?
With yet another fiction: money.” What do you
think “the fiction of money” is?
8. What role does the ghostwriter Ida Partenza
play in Trust?
9. “The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of
past events shifting as they rush away from
us.” What perspective does Mildred’s diary,
‘Futures’, give to the preceding narratives?
10. Andrew Bevel says, “If I’m ever wrong, I must
make use of all my means and resources to
bend and align reality according to my mistake
so that it ceases to be a mistake.”
How do money and power manipulate facts?
Service95
 06

Interviews with Hernan Diaz

Read:
‘If ever I find myself on the page, I view it as an
immense failure’ – The Guardian, 2023
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the punk
rock provocation of his writing, an epiphany at
the gym and working with Kate Winslet on the
HBO adaptation of his novel Trust.
Listen:
Hernan Diaz’s anticipated novel Trust
probes the illusion of money – and the
truth – NPR, 2022
NPR talks with Hernan Diaz about his novel.

Watch:
Trust author Hernan Diaz – CBS Sunday
Morning, 2023

Hernan Diaz talks about how his childhood in

Argentina and Sweden informed his perspective
on American life and history, and the miracle
of validation that came after years of writing
without recognition.

Further The Great Gatsby, Stock Market Crash

Resources F. Scott Fitzgerald of 1929 – Federal

The story of Jay Gatsby,
Ladies of self-made millionaire, and
his pursuit of childhood flame
the Ticker Daisy Buchanan. Set in Jazz-
Pioneering Women age New York, it’s a story of
Stockbrokers from the 1880s money, love, corruption and
to the 1920s – Museum of the American Dream.
American Finance, 2017
Reserve History
On Black Monday, 28 October,
1929, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average declined nearly
13%. Federal Reserve leaders
differed on how to respond
to the event and support the
financial system.

Discussion Guide Service95