Trust

 I read Trust, the co-winner of the 2023 Pulitzer-prize for fiction.  I haven't read the other winner, Demon Copperhead, but can't imagine it's as good as Trust.  In all my recent reading of prize-winning novels, I've read none better than Trust.

But on the downside, it would help a reader if he knew something of economics and the stock market.  I know more about the former than the latter.  Years ago, a long-shoreman who was greatly impressed by a fellow long-shoreman who was a well-versed in communism, would urge various books upon me.  I read them all and didn't then have a good answer to Marx, but I spent time in the company library at Douglas Aircraft and discovered John Maynard Keynes, after which I discounted anything this longshoreman, or his friend had to say on the subject; however, I wasn't all that interested in economics and haven't spent any time with it until Trust.  How much trouble someone would have with no background in economics at all, I don't know, but I suspect some.   As to the stock market, perhaps most of us know a bit more about that.  And maybe the novel is self-explanatory enough, and I am exaggerating its difficulty.

But even if one knows quite a lot about economics and the stock market, Diaz, takes us beyond with the capability to get into a zone and know what is going to happen (without having facts in mind) before it happens.  Still having the concept of interactive reading, I recall being in a lunch-time hearts card game at McDonnell Douglas.  My partner was an electronics engineer named Bob Servis who counted cards.  I did not count cards, but at critical points when I needed to do the right thing and paused, not exactly thinking it over but feeling (or something) my way, I soon felt what was probably right and it invariably was.  Bob Servis would smile with satisfaction, but it was during this time that I met Susan on the McDonnell Douglas bus and subsequently gave up card playing.  Bob Servis never forgave me.

To account for my success, I did pay close attention to everything being played, so maybe I subconsciously counted cards, but then maybe the heavy hitters at stock market trading do something like that, but certain people, perhaps only one person in Diaz's novel goes way beyond that.  By the time I learned who this was and what had happened, I was entirely impressed.  The only reason I won't say "happy" is that the ending was a bit sad. And yet the most important person in the novel, dying unrecognized, died happy, mostly, or so it would seem.