When I was a know-it-all adolescent, I once watched a middle-aged couple eating breakfast silently at the other end of a coffee shop and commented scornfully to my companion, ”How pathetic! You’ll never catch me in that kind of relationship. Look, they have nothing to talk about, and they stay together anyway.” I had the idea that never-ending talk – sharing ideas and confidences – signified the depth of a relationship. For sure, that is one possible marker of closeness. However, the novel Trust by Hernan Diaz shows us an intriguing yet quite opposite model of intimacy between two introverts.
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