Trust Study Guide

Hernan Diaz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1973. His family immigrated to Sweden in 1975 following a military coup in Argentina before returning to Argentina in 1983. Diaz graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and then pursued a master’s degree at King’s College in London. He received a PhD from New York University in 1999 with a dissertation titled “Figures of confinement: Literature and claustrophilia.” In 2012, he published a nonfiction book of literary analysis about the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges titled, Borges, Between History and Eternity. Diaz published his first novel, In the Distance, in 2017, and the book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His second novel, Trust, was published in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in conjunction with Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead. Diaz now lives in New York City.

Significant portions of Trust detail the 1920s leading up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the crash itself, and the Great Depression that followed. In the 1920s, the U.S. economy along with the Wall Street stock market experienced unprecedented growth. The market reached its peak on September 3, 1929. After that growth, a combination of causes precipitated the crash of 1929. Those causes included overpriced stock shares, agricultural overproduction, people taking out loans to buy stocks, inflated bank loans, and panic selling of stocks when the market began to decline. That decline became apparent on October 18, 1929, when the stock market plummeted rapidly. The crash then often refers to October 24, 1929, and October 29, 1929. On October 24, more shares of stock were sold than on any other day in U.S. history. On October 29, 1929, another 16 million or so shares of stock were sold. In that crash, billions of dollars were lost, and countless people lost their life savings. That crash marked the beginning of the Great Depression, a period of extreme economic hardship in the U.S. and across the world that lasted from 1929 to 1939. In Trust, Andrew Bevel repeatedly disputes the role that others claim he played in the 1929 crash, and Ida meets Andrew in 1938, while she and her father are facing the impacts of the Great Depression.

Trust examines issues of wealth, class, status, and gender in the 1920s in a way that is reminiscent of, though ultimately different from, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. In Trust, copies of The Great Gatsby are also sold in the Bevel House museum, suggesting that within the world of the novel, Andrew Bevel is considered to be something of a Great Gatsby figure. Trust also uses various documents, including a novel-within-the-novel, to gradually peel away layers of fiction and reveal a core of truth. Those formal devices are similar to those in Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise, which also uses various characters' perspectives and a novel-within-a-novel to examine the nature of trust, truth, fiction, and storytelling. The first part of Trust—Harold Vanner’s novel Bonds—is written in a style that’s reminiscent of Henry James and Edith Wharton, both of whom are mentioned in Trust. Some of James’s most well-known works include The Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady, while Wharton’s most well-known works include The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and House of Mirth.