For Trust always acknowledges the world that lies outside its own pages. The true circularity here lies in the workings of capital, in a monetary system so self-referential that it has forgotten what Diaz himself remembers. a strangely self-reflexive work: strangely, because unlike some metafictional exercises this book does more than chase its own tail. much of the novel’s pleasure derives from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises. It’s a disorienting but effective way to present a character who seems almost entirely without an inner life of his own, whose whole being lies in anticipating the clickety-click of a ticker tape. In both books, he reports on his characters’ inner lives instead of dramatizing them, and in Vanner’s hands especially, the result reads more like a biography than a novel: a narrative without dialogue, in which Rask’s life is given to us more often in summary than in scenes. Diaz relies in contrast on a far one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and dispassionate. Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person. Diaz’s own prose keeps an antiseptic distance of its own, no matter who his narrator might be. intricate, cunning and consistently surprising.
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