Hernan Diaz, _Trust_

 CRAFTIER THAN USUAL for a Pulitzer winner, it seems to me. Most of the recent winners have been excellent novels, I would say. The winning books by (for example) Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers, Joshua Cohen, and Viet Thanh Nguyen were all thematically compelling, richly imagined, and masterfully written but tended to play by the usual rules (The Underground Railroad not so much, perhaps, but The Nickel Boys was fairly straightforward). Trust demands that you stay on your toes as a reader as well as being being thematically compelling, richly imagined, and masterfully written.

Trust purports to be four different texts by four different authors. The first is a slightly catty gossip-based novel by one Harold Vanner, about Benjamin and Helen Rask--a wildly wealthy financier of the 1910s and 1920s and his wife, whose high-profile patronage of the arts is derailed by the wife's mental disintegration. This part conjured up Henry Blake Fuller, Louis Auchincloss, that sort of thing.

The second is an unfinished--and fatuous and self-serving--memoir by Henry Bevel, who, we gradually realize, is the real-life model of Benjamin Rask. Rask is obviously mighty pissed-off at the Vanner novel and wants to set the record straight, as it were, not that he is going to openly acknowledge the existence of either Vanner or his novel. He just wants to make clear that financiers are the real backbone of the country and that his wife Mildred was a sweet guileless woman with her whimsical art projects who unfortunately died young of a terrible incurable disease.

You don't suppose that a busy man like Henry Bevel has the time to write his own memoir, do you? No, no--he hired a ghost writer, whose story we get in the third section. Ida Partenza, writing her own memoir decades later, describes how Bevel hired her, what he wanted, and she managed to intuit the  written voice Bevel wanted to have and convey Bevel's message. Almost needless to say, Ida is a hell of a lot more interesting than Bevel, and she suspects there is a lot more to Mildred than either Bevel or Vanner grasped--

--a suspicion confirmed when Ida turns up the journal Mildred Bevel's kept during her final illness. Not only is her patronage of the arts much more important than the dilettantish activity described by Vanner and Bevel (she backs Hindemith and Alban Berg), but she is actually the real brains of her husband's operations.

What is the book about? The power of money, for one thing, of the power of enormous wealth to actually bend the course of events, about male obtuseness, about the stories that don't get told but still leave traces by which they can be reconstructed, if you know where to look.