Trust
2022 • 416 pages

Ratings159

Average rating3.8

15
eb5
EricSupporter

Trust isn't a typical novel; it's broken up into 4 mini-books all told from a different perspective and with a different voice. The first one is the longest and written like a (kinda old-fashioned, tedious) biography of a 1920s financial titan. The next three tell that same financial titan's story from different perspectives, filling in a lot of color and calling into question a lot of the claims of the first mini-book.

I'd say the novel starts getting interesting once the 3rd mini-book starts revealing what's really going on in the first two books, and the 4th book provides some satisfying answers and closure to the story as a whole.

With that, I can't say I fully enjoyed reading Trust, however I have thought plenty about the novel since I finished it, both immediately after and as a talking-point to reference for a long while since. It's a great example of how all stories, like each of these mini-books, can be molded to make the truth fit whatever narrative its writer wants to tell (or is capable of telling from their limited, or self-centered, perspective).

By the end of the book you understand a lot more about what kind of person Benjamin Rask/Andrew Bevel really was, and how the people in his life were much different than the original biography (book 1), and Andrew's follow-up autobiography (book 2), suggest.

December 5, 2024