Two Pulitzer Prize-winning books
A memoir about friendship and a novel about money, power, and storytelling.
Hello, and welcome back to Field Notes. This week I’m recommending two books, the novel Trust by Hernan Diaz and the memoir Stay True by Hua Hsu — both of which recently won Pulitzer Prizes.
Trust and Stay True
I recommend these two books not because they won a prestigious prize but because they are both excellent books about friendship and storytelling.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust is a novel told in four parts. The first is a novel within a novel about a Wall Street tycoon and his wife who dies of an unnamed illness. The second is an autobiography of the Wall Street heavyweight the first book was based on. The third is a memoir from the writer who aided said tycoon in writing his autobiography. And finally, the fourth book is the diary of the tycoon’s late wife.
If that all sounds like a lot, you can put your mind at ease. You are in safe hands with Diaz who tells a smoothly intertwined story out of these four competing narratives. While the four sections may be covering much of the same ground, they are told with such distinctly different voices and points of view that it always feels like what you are reading is new.
Trust has a lot to say about storytelling, who gets to tell their stories, and whose stories will be believed. Influence and power play a central role in this, and both the subject matter and structure allow for insights into this power — who wields it and how it can be used.
In Stay True, Hua Hsu recounts his years at UC Berkeley and his friendship with Ken, who was killed in a carjacking while they were at university. It’s a memoir about art, loss, and growing up. It might also be the best book about friendship I’ve read.
Throughout the book, Hsu writes warmly about his friendship with Ken. One of his strengths is how he is able to look inward at himself and at his flaws, development, and grief. He writes romantically, but not too nostalgically. You get a sense this was how things were, not how he might now want to remember them.
“He asked questions out of earnest curiosity, and I asked questions that were skeptical or coolly condescending,” Hsu writes of Ken.
It’s an uplifting book for one that has such a devastating event at its core. Ken’s death is sudden, even though you know it is coming. Hsu is writing about a dear friend, one he only knew for less than three years and who died 25 years ago, but one who clearly left a huge mark on him.
A note on Martin Amis
Martin Amis, the British novelist, died a few weeks ago. I only discovered his work in the past year but I was quickly taken by the sense of fun he wrote with. He wrote great sentences and his characters are wicked (in every sense of the word). This piece by A.O. Scott in The New York Times does a great job explaining his appeal.
A photo from the vault
I was digging around my old photos and found this from 2020 of these two hanging out in Crescent Beach, Florida.
My bad: In the last edition, when writing about the film Air, I said Nike lured Michael Jordan away from Adidas and Reebok, it was Adidas and Converse.