Customer Reviews

Trust: A Novel

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I was so glad when I got to page 639 of Trust - it was finally over. I had literally slogged through the last 600 pages of one of the most ponderous narratives I can ever remember reading. Its hard to find a reason to recommend it - the characters are unlikeable, the tone is heavy-handed and pedantic, the plot holds few surprises and is otherwise subsumed by the many philosophical digressions.

Trust is a story of a sad sack of a girl (frumpy intellectual 20-something) in a dysfunctional relationship with the world, "searching" for a father she has never met. Trust is the story of her quest to find him.

Unfortunately, the quest is largely internal, and is sloooowly revealed through the interactions with 3 other (really unlikeable) main characters -- (1) her mother, Allegra, a vapid and extremely wealthy socialite (2) her stepfather, Enoch, a logician and "intellectual", and (3) her mother's first husband, William, a dour attorney who manages the "Trust".

Selfish, self-satisfied, self-righteous - all of the characters are 2-dimensional caricatures of people you hope to never get stuck with at a cocktail party. Everyone appears to really dislike the narrator for his or her own reasons, which are self-absorbed and explored exhaustively. For that matter, everyone seems to dislike everyone, which is one thing I had in common with the characters....

I love Cynthia Ozick's writing and although there are bursts of brilliance, I found this book largely unreadable.