Trust Fun

As a novel about the narrative layers that great wealth accrues around itself, and its social power to shape our perceptions of reality, the nested stories about a billionaire and his wife—and the stories the stories about them tell and retell—that make up Borges scholar Hernan Diaz’s Kirkus Prize–winning 2022 novel Trust are less about the first half of the twentieth century than the first half of the twenty-first, a time when it has never been more pertinent to ask: “Is there a great crime or a brilliant pearl at the core of the tawdry psychodramas that seem to accompany every billionaire’s wealth? Or does he just turn out to be sort of a dumb guy?”