ny times book review of trust

The Secrets of an American Fortune, Told Four Ways

“Trust,” by Hernan Diaz, examines the human costs of wealth in a novel that keeps revising itself.

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By Michael Gorra

• April 28, 2022
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TRUST, by Hernan Diaz

“The secret of all great fortunes, when there’s no obvious explanation for them, is always some forgotten crime.” These words come from “Le Père Goriot” (1835), Honoré de Balzac’s great novel about the mysteries of Paris, and in English they’re most often quoted without the qualifying phrase in the middle. After all, what counts as an obvious explanation? The ownership of land? Balzac’s society might have thought so; now we ask how that land was first acquired. Innovation? Maybe, but take a closer look at the human costs and natural resources needed to bring ideas to market.

Of course, we also have to consider who’s speaking. Balzac puts those words in the mouth of a master criminal, and then adds a final twist. The crime has been “forgotten, mind you, because it’s been properly handled,” the bodies neatly disposed of and the bank notes washed clean.

That’s the hope anyway — or the fear, depending on whose side you’re on — and that’s the world Hernan Diaz explores in “Trust,” his intricate, cunning and consistently surprising second novel. Trust: both a moral quality and a financial arrangement, as though virtue and money were synonymous. The term also has a literary bearing: Can we trust this tale? Is this narrator reliable? Diaz breaks the book into four sections, and the title of the first one is similarly ambiguous, echoing that of the whole work. It’s called “Bonds” and presented as a novel written in the third person by someone named Harold Vanner. We won’t know who he is until the later sections, many pages after “Bonds” is over; let’s call him a forgotten novelist, whose case has been properly handled.

“Bonds” begins comfortably, its assured prose the appropriate instrument for its tale of a well-upholstered life: “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.” We are in old-money New York in the last years of the 19th century, and though this world will remind readers of Edith Wharton, Diaz has a much keener interest in just how that money works. Industrialists have replaced merchants as the city’s rulers, and will in turn be replaced by financiers. Rask comes from a family of tobacco traders, but he hates “the primitive sucking and puffing” that a good cigar requires. As soon as his father dies, he sells out and begins to play the market: to play it not as one plays golf or baseball but as a musician plays an instrument, caressing its strings, lightly pressing this key or that.

Rask will become a virtuoso of money, but he never connects the tunes he plays to any effect they might have on the world outside. Instead he views “capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill and may die. But it is clean. … The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details.” Diaz’s own prose keeps an antiseptic distance of its own, no matter who his narrator might be. His superb first novel, “ In the Distance ,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is set in the American West during the Gold Rush, and its language creates a world in which both physical and psychic space seem stretched. Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person. Diaz relies in contrast on a far one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and dispassionate. 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.

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. Still, the rich man does eventually discover that he is in want of a wife. His choice is a young woman named Helen Brevoort, an American girl from an old Knickerbocker family who has been raised in Europe. She’s interested in the arts and philanthropy, and she also has strange talents of her own, including a memory so faultless that after a brief glance she can recite from two randomly chosen books at once, alternating them sentence by sentence. But no talent is without its price, and hers will eventually lead her to a Swiss sanitarium.

So add Henry James to Wharton, and Thomas Mann too. Diaz’s first book was a study of Jorge Luis Borges , and like the Argentine master he has the whole literary past at his fingertips. “Bonds” sets the tune on which the novel’s three other sections play variations, and I’ve concentrated on it in order to avoid any spoilers; for much of the novel’s pleasure derives from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises.

Still, I can say that the second part claims to be a memoir by another financier, its pages full of notes meant to be developed later, and full as well of self-exculpation. This man claims he only ever wanted what was good and right for his country, and that includes his attempt to short the entire stock market in advance of the Great Depression. The book’s third and longest part is in the voice of an Italian American novelist, Ida Partenza, the Brooklyn-born daughter of an anarchist printer: an old woman now, in the 1990s, recounting a story from her youth that will make us distrust the entirety of the novel’s first two sections. I won’t say anything about the brief fourth narrative except that it too revises everything that has come before.

“Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was.” Those words are as true of this exhilarating and intelligent novel as they are of the mysterious character who speaks them, a figure hidden at the center of money’s web. Taken together, the four parts make “Trust” into a strangely self-reflexive work: strangely, because unlike some metafictional exercises this book does more than chase its own tail. 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. For “Trust” always acknowledges the world that lies outside its own pages. It recognizes the human costs of a great fortune, even though its characters can see nothing beyond their own calculations; they are most guilty when most innocent, most enthralled by the abstraction of money itself. Diaz gives an extreme form of that fascination to his most attractive character, who says, “Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future,” like a modernist writer dealing with the flux and flow of consciousness. The speaker of those words cannot even imagine that such a fortune might hide a crime. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Michael Gorra’s books include “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War” and “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece.” He teaches at Smith.

TRUST, by Hernan Diaz | 402 pp. | Riverhead Books. | $28.

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Book Reviews

You can't 'trust' this novel. and that's a very good thing.

Maureen Corrigan

Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of those novels that's always pulling a fast one on a reader. Take the opening section: You settle in, become absorbed in the story and, then, 100 pages or so later — Boom! — the novel lurches into another narrative that upends the truth of everything that came before.

When a work of fiction reminds me that it is a work of fiction simply to show me how gullible I am, well, thanks, I knew that already. But sometimes these metadramatic maneuvers serve a novel's larger themes. Susan Choi's 2019 novel, Trust Exercise , about the misleading powers of art and memory, is one recent instance; now, Diaz's Trust is another. That word "trust" in both their titles is a tip-off that that's exactly what we readers shouldn't do upon entering these slippery fictional worlds.

Trust is all about money, particularly, the flimflam force of money in the stock market, and its potential, as a character says, "to bend and align reality" to its own purposes. The opening section is imagined as a novel-within-a novel, entitled Bonds , a 1937 best-seller about the rise of a Wall Street tycoon named Benjamin Rask. Think of figures like J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab, men whose DNA was made of strands of ticker tape. We learn that Rask is that rarest of creatures, a wealthy man without appetites. Our narrator tells us Rask is fascinated by only one thing:

If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. ... There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transactions affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion ...

Author Interviews

Hernan diaz's anticipated novel 'trust' probes the illusion of money — and the truth.

For the sake of posterity, Rask does eventually marry — an equally self-contained woman named Helen. Throughout the Roaring '20s, Rask accrues wealth and Helen finds her place as a patron of the arts. Then, comes the Crash of 1929.

Because Rask profits from other speculators' losses, rumors circulate that he rigged the Crash and he and Helen are ostracized. The final chapters of this saga detail Helen's ordeal as a patient at a psychiatric institute in Switzerland; her mania and her eczema, described as a "merciless red flat monster gnawing on her skin," are reminiscent of the real life torments of Zelda Fitzgerald.

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The opening section of Trust , as I've said, is so sharply realized, it's disorienting to begin the novel's next section, composed of notes on a story that sounds like the one we've just read. But, then, Diaz lures us readers into once again suspending our disbelief when we reach the captivating third section of his novel, which mostly takes place during the Great Depression. There, a young woman from Brooklyn named Ida Partenza becomes the secretary — and ghostwriter — for a financial mogul named Andrew Bevel.

Bevel's life is the source for that best-selling novel, Bonds , and he's so infuriated by that novel, he's had all copies removed from the New York public library system. Bevel hires Ida to help him write a memoir that will set the record straight. Sure. The fourth and final section of Trust is wired with booby traps, blowing the whole artifice up before our wide-open eyes.

Trust is an ingeniously constructed historical novel with a postmodern point. Throughout, Diaz makes a connection between the realms of fiction and finance. As Ida's father, an Italian anarchist, says:

Money is a fantastic commodity. You can't eat or wear money, but it represents all the food and clothes in the world. This is why it's a fiction. ... Stocks, shares, bonds. Do you think any of these things those bandits across the river buy and sell represent any real, concrete value? No. ... That's what all these criminals trade in: fictions.

Literary fiction, too, is a fantastic commodity in which our best writers become criminals of the imagination, stealing our attention and our very desires. Diaz, whose last novel, In the Distance , reworked the myths of masculine individualism in the American West, makes an artistic fortune in Trust . And we readers make out like bandits, too.

Review: Hernan Diaz’s jigsaw-puzzle novel aims to debunk American myths

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On the Shelf

By Hernan Diaz Riverhead: 426 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Andrew Bevel, the elusive Manhattan financier at the center of Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust ,” is all story, no substance. A 6-feet-tall stack of $100 bills dressed in a Savile Row suit, Bevel’s only notable trait is that he’s a schmuck.

Nonetheless, Bevel’s name is engraved in stone on New York institutions and pressed onto the front pages of newspapers. His whims flip the markets, demolish industries, control the livelihoods of every creature in this country. He claims in his autobiography, “My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few,” but that implies there is a life to know. As one character explains, “[H]e had no appetites to repress.”

Then again, that’s the point of him. The hollow core of the great man myth is Diaz’s recurring project. He specializes in plaster busts that look like marble only from a distance.

In his first novel, the nearly perfect “ In the Distance ,” Diaz created the un-Bevel in a mid-19th century Swedish immigrant named Håkan, a man of enormous physical stature and dejected humility who accidentally turns himself into a folk hero. History has tricked us into revering these men, Diaz suggests, so he will too. His new entry in that project, “Trust,” is a wily jackalope of a novel — tame but prickly, a different beast from every angle.

If you can keep this straight, “Trust” has four parts inside it: a novel within the novel followed by an autobiography in progress followed by a memoir and finally a primary source. The novel, “Bonds,” by a chap called Harold Vanner, is the tale of Benjamin and Helen Rask — thinly disguised stand-ins for Bevel and his wife, Mildred — early 20th century Manhattan bigwigs who grow richer and more reclusive in tandem until Helen dies, mad and logorrheic, in a Swiss sanatorium. Succès de scandale .

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The autobiography, “My Life,” is Bevel’s attempt at a refutation: Vanner, he insists, wrongly skewered him as the proximate cause of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and misrepresented his sweet, simple wife as a gilded-caged Bertha Mason . It’s less mea culpa , more me me me .

Just as Bevel’s autobiography retells the story of the novel, the memoir guts the autobiography like a still-wriggling fish. The author of “A Memoir, Remembered” is a striving first-generation Italian American woman named Ida Partenza (alias Ida Prentice, get it, apprentice ?) who seems to have the real truth in her grasp. Until that changes. I won’t reveal the contents of the final section; that would unravel Diaz’s careful cross-stitch. But let’s just say it too undoes what came before.

Readers either adore or abhor trickster novels. Think of how Ian McEwan’s “ Atonement ” and Susan Choi’s “ Trust Exercise ” evoke such vehement reactions depending on the reader’s tolerance for high jinks. Both, in my estimation, are hands-down successes: Their twists fulfill a compact with the reader.

Diaz, on the other hand, undercuts himself. I’m delighted that he messes with narrative: By all means, mash fiction into sludge and refire it into something new. But if everything is a ruse — and absolutely every bit of “Trust” betrays its title — the reveal has to live up to the subterfuge. Diaz’s revelation will wallop you with its obviousness. It’s a trick that women perfected in decades long gone.

I mean this, in a way, as a backward compliment: The disappointment is intense because the setup is so shrewd and the writing so immaculate. “Trust” mimics narrative conventions so masterfully that Diaz can smuggle in an entire story without attracting attention. As with “ Chicago’s ” slippery Billy Flynn, “You notice how his mouth never moves.”

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It starts with a literary honey trap: Vanner’s novel about the Rasks is the sort of faux-Whartonian confection that relies heavily on descriptions of polished wood and unpolished manners: snobbery and snubbery. Buttercream fiction — too rich in every way. I’m embarrassed to admit it checked all my boxes: hushed mansions, gilded cages and sanatorium scenes lifted right out of “The Magic Mountain.”

Bevel’s staid and self-deluded “My Life” (a Bill Clinton jab , one can only hope) follows every tired convention of the windy autobiographies of tycoons and other rich twits. It’s scoldy: “I hope my words will steel the reader against not only the regrettable conditions of our time but also against any form of coddling.” It’s also entirely belittling of his partner: Mildred is a “quiet, steady presence … placid moral example … like a sweetly mischievous child.” But it parcels out just enough facts divergent from “Bonds” — Helen Rask dies when her heart gives out after experimental “Convulsive Therapy,” Mildred Bevel of a cruel tumor — to invite more interest in Bevel, not less.

Ida’s memoir, set in 1938 and “written” in 1981, promises the clarity of a third party. More specifically, a female third party, unyoked from ego. In Italian, al punto di partenza means to come full circle, and Miss Partenza, with her insights into Bevel, tries to close the loop on his life. It’s no accident that her own story — raised by an anarchist father who, significantly, runs a printing press (every major character is devoted to the written word) — proves more alluring than a mogul’s. She is the kind of person — poor, self-taught, female — so often overshadowed by the great men of history. Bevel underestimates her, and Mildred, at his peril.

And in this house of blind spots, what is Diaz’s? He underestimates how many times we’ve seen this story before and how little it will surprise readers to discover that a woman is smarter and more complicated than men present her to be. We cannot keep locking madwomen in the attic just so we can free them to cheers and sighs of relief.

Diaz’s ending presumes to get at the root of something: “Trust” takes an obvious fiction and sheds more and more pretense as it goes along. It even begins with a bound and sold book and ends with a secret, illegible one, as if authenticity can flow only from the nib of a pen. But “Trust” spoofs so much that it winds up spoofing itself. Novels must tell a truth, even when they don’t tell the truth.

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Can a Novel Capture the Power of Money?

By David S. Wallace

Readers of fiction often ask to be transported. To be “moved” is the great passive verb of experiencing art: we are absorbed, we are overtaken. If we take the phrase at face value, we are most excited when we are least participants—when we surrender to the power of an art work, trusting the artist, or even that greater and more nebulous power we call “the story,” to take us somewhere we could not have foreseen.

Markets move, too, through a force we don’t quite understand. Though Adam Smith rarely used the phrase in his writings, his metaphor of the invisible hand has—true to the image—gradually taken on a life of its own. The idea that the market has an independent power, directing itself better than any individual could, dominated the twentieth century, and grew especially pronounced after the Second World War, as the gospel of deregulation swept across the globe. As Ronald Reagan put it, “the magic of the marketplace” was at work. And yet the invisible hand appears only once in Smith’s landmark work, “ The Wealth of Nations ,” as part of a withering assessment of good intentions. The true capitalist, Smith writes,

intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

Even if an investor wanted to improve society, Smith argues, his bright ideas would be less effective than the aggregate flows of supply and demand. Money moves in mysterious ways, and regardless of whether the effects are harmonious, or simply random, they’re felt in daily life: a good deal on a mortgage one year might mean foreclosure the next. This impersonal force can feel like a god to whose whims we are subject. Maybe even like an author moving characters across the page.

In one sense, money has always powered the novel. Plot is derived from loss and gain, whether it’s the passive income of a Jane Austen suitor or the grinding poverty depicted in Knut Hamsun’s “ Hunger .” But as money became a global system—a vast web of transactions, fascinating precisely because it has no signature image, no physical presence—the task of portraying it became trickier. The large banks and mythic financiers of the nineteenth century were useful symbols, dramatized in novels by Dickens, Balzac, and Zola. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, global finance lodged itself permanently in the public imagination, and novelists tried once more to capture its bland totality. Zia Haider Rahman’s “ In the Light of What We Know ,” about a banker who observes a classmate straying dangerously from the path of prosperity, linked the shadowy world of finance to the war on terror. John Lanchester’s “ Capital ” studied a street of London houses—the literal capital of the row’s inhabitants—to chart a constellation of urban lives. For the most part, though, markets elude the grasp of representation. How can a novel capture this opaque, all-powerful, and essential force?

In “ Trust ,” Hernan Diaz takes a unique approach to the problem. The book—which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and will soon be adapted into a TV series starring Kate Winslet—manipulates the machinery of story itself, presenting four narratives that interlock like nesting boxes. Diaz’s title hints at his intentions: in financial terms, a trust is an arrangement that allows a third party to hold assets for a beneficiary. (A bank, for example, might manage an inheritance until the inheritor reaches a certain age.) This, of course, requires a belief that the bank is a stable, even benevolent institution. Diaz’s novel suggests that a similar compact sustains the world of narrative. A story, like a dollar bill, can do its work only when we accept its value, when we know that we’re in safe hands. Once we question it, things get more complicated.

“Trust” begins with a novel-within-a-novel: a book by a writer named Harold Vanner called “Bonds.” It tells the story of Benjamin Rask, a scion of an New York, Gilded Age family, who has “enjoyed almost every advantage since birth.” Rask is a restless youth, indifferent to high-society luxury; nothing seems to interest him until he discovers the magic of the stock market. Transfixed by the ticker-tape feed, he transforms his inheritance into a financial juggernaut, a firm trading in “gold and guano, in currencies and cotton, in bonds and beef.”

Rask is a taciturn character, stripped of personality and defined largely in the negative: he is “an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover.” Even his interest in money is somewhat abstract. But this blank, sterile quality reflects his vocation, an inscrutable trade that remains almost monstrously real:

If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details.

A fortune comes easily to Rask; the question is what to do with it. In classic novelistic fashion, he decides to find a wife. Enter Helen Brevoort, the only daughter of a hard-up but respectable family, and a mathematics prodigy who performs in the expatriate salons of Europe. Helen and Benjamin marry, but Helen can’t reciprocate Benjamin’s love—there is always a chilly “distance” between them. Her talents and imagination are neutralized, then funnelled into philanthropy, the classic pressure valve of capital accumulation. When Benjamin achieves even more staggering profits by shorting the crash of 1929, the Rasks become social pariahs, and Helen slips into a mysterious illness. As the story comes to a tragic close, the reader looks up to discover that they’re only a quarter of the way through the novel.

Diaz is an author who confidently, often gleefully, rejects literary trends. His first novel, “ In the Distance ” (2017), was published when he was in his mid-forties, working as a scholar at Columbia; the manuscript was plucked out of a slush pile and went on to receive a Pulitzer nomination. The book is an offbeat Western whose protagonist, a hulking Swede named Håkan, boards the wrong boat—to San Francisco instead of New York City. He spends the rest of the story travelling not west but east, in order to find his brother. The standard tropes are there, from devious gold prospectors to endless wagon trains, but the form is scrambled; Diaz triggers the pleasure of recognition without collapsing into cliché. He creates a rich odyssey of American weirdness: turn the page, and a new mad scientist or religious cult might appear.

Diaz doesn’t endow Håkan with much interiority; we rarely get access to his thoughts, and his conversations are stymied by the language barrier—a clever twist on the strong, silent type. Similarly, “Bonds,” the novel-within-a-novel, has no dialogue from its characters, and so can feel like a summary, an outline awaiting further development. But this text is just the first piece of the puzzle. The next section is a manuscript entitled “My Life,” by someone named Andrew Bevel. Narrated in the first person, Bevel’s life clearly resembles Rask’s—he’s a rich New York financier who profited from the crash and whose wife died from an illness—but the details start to blur and diverge. More strangely, a curious unevenness begins to surface in the text, as if the writing were giving notes to itself:

More examples of his business acumen. Show his pioneering spirit. […] More about mother.

There is something deft and quite funny about this maneuver—in peeking into the unfinished manuscript of a vain billionaire’s memoir, one feels a surprising intimacy, even as you learn the shortcomings of the subject’s imagination. It’s clear that Bevel’s “Life” exists to correct his fictionalization in “Bonds,” which portrays him as callous, at best, and at worst coldly villainous toward his wife. Unfortunately, Bevel can’t quite seem to muster evidence for his compassion: “She touched everyone with her kindness and generosity. Examples.” There’s a deep readerly pleasure in this detective work, in asking how these two “books” are related, and why. Though their specifics differ, there is a shared belief in the near-religious power of market forces. As Bevel writes, “finance is the thread that runs through every aspect of life. It is indeed the knot where all the disparate strands of human existence come together.” But how can we trust him, or even be sure that all the strands cohere?

Diaz’s exploration of these questions, stitched together with various metafictional threads, owes something to the high-postmodern school of writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and David Markson. Gaddis’s mammoth second novel “ J R ” may be the novel’s closest relation, at least thematically; it centers on an eleven-year-old student who constructs a financial empire largely over the phone, highlighting the sheer chaos underlying financial genius. (The novel is written almost entirely in dialogue.) Even when the postmodern novel doesn’t portray the sprawling network of globalized finance, it’s drawn to shadowy networks that suggest it—for instance, the international postal-service conspiracy in Pynchon’s “ The Crying of Lot 49 .” Some critics have referred to these works as “systems novels,” books that map the myriad, often contradictory structures that define the modern world. Diaz’s novel, however, doesn’t quite fit this definition. Instead of trying to dramatize the sheer scale of global finance, each episode in “Trust” hints at the deceptions of a great, airy abstraction. The drama lies in trying to puzzle out where Diaz will take you next, what’s been hidden, and why.

Although “Trust” belongs to the postmodern tradition, its direct lineage is more specific. Just as “In the Distance” was a pastiche of the Western genre, “Trust” is a pastiche, too, though Diaz savvily disguises his sources. Is the book a sly take on the robber barons of the Gilded Age? A scrambled version of “ The Great Gatsby ,” with Rask and Bevel losing their loved ones despite their titanic wealth? Or is it an homage to Progressive-era novels like Theodore Dreiser’s “ The Financier ,” which is coyly cited in the text?

The philosopher Fredric Jameson placed pastiche at the center of postmodernism, calling it “blank parody”: a collection of codes or references, specific to a subject or field, that don’t make a particular comment on that subject, as a parody might. For Jameson, the form’s popularity was discouraging: books such as E.L. Doctorow’s “ Ragtime ,” though admirable, didn’t properly represent experience, instead borrowing styles, images, and ideas and rearranging them into a kind of fantasy. Global markets were another source of “dead language,” spreading the jargon of “faceless masters,” whose policies “constrain our existences.” Diaz’s achievement is to turn the weapon back on its wielder. He realizes that pastiche is similar to an option or a derivative—an act of placing value on the value of something, rather than on the thing itself. Using the tools of the “faceless masters,” he foregrounds the individuals, and the idiosyncracies, so often lost in vagaries of the system.

The third section of “Trust” continues to complicate the picture. Titled “A Memoir, Remembered,” its narrator is a famous writer named Ida Partenza, whose recollections begin as she strolls uptown to Bevel House, the financier’s mansion turned museum. Partenza, who has declined an offer to write about the museum, has a secret connection to Bevel: as a young woman, she was hired to ghostwrite his failed memoir. Her rise from humble Brooklyn origins into the rarified world of finance helps to expand the novel’s vision—under Bevel, she performed labor just as “invisible” as the banking exploits she was hired to embellish. Her education as a writer adds another self-reflexive touch; in order to invent her employer’s voice, she hit the library, looking for memoirs of “Great American Men,” learning to ventriloquize Bevel’s bland language of dollars. In some ways, her section is the most conventional one: it’s a bildungsroman with intrigue and round characters, shifting back and forward in time. Partenza’s father, a printer and anarchist ex-agitator, adds a political perspective that’s absent in the book’s more moneyed figures. Both a dreamer and a voice of reason, he has perhaps the keenest sense of the relationship between money and narrative: “Stock, shares and all that garbage are just claims to a future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.”

In the final section, Diaz turns to the most private part of this tangled network. “Futures” is the diary of Mildred, Andrew Bevel’s wife—the figure around whom so much of “Trust” revolves, but who has until now remained elusive. Mildred writes from a sanatorium, and her spare, cryptic jottings feel like the pearl at the book’s center, partly because they insist on the specificity of individual experience. Mildred is poetic in her attention to sensation, as when a nurse covers her “with a sheet that first balloons with a breeze of camphor and then settles with a waft of, I suppose, Alpine herbs. Gooseflesh.” Bevel believed that he could project his genius into the unfilled spaces of his memoir, but Mildred’s world seems to be receding, as death makes money irrelevant. She is deeply aware of the one experience that can’t be exchanged with anything else: “Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one.” The value she places on perception, its fleeting integrity, is antithetical to the financial schemes and elaborate fictions that characterize the rest of “Trust.” Diaz masterfully orchestrates a retreat that, while never disputing finance’s pervasiveness, hints at where a refuge from its predations might lie.

Financial faith relies on the notion that everything works out for the best, irrespective of individual desires. “Trust” gives the reader opportunities to feel that same tension in narrative itself, to question the apparently smooth operations of fiction while still becoming invested in its drama. Through these indirections, Diaz leads the reader on a journey from abstractions—all that literature is capable of representing, including the markets and moneymen that rule the world—down to something small, private, and experiential. Perhaps “Trust,” in the end, makes a surprisingly un-postmodern case for what the novel can do. It can deliver discrete, luminous sensations. It can make one subjectivity clear at a time. And it can help you appreciate experience—your hand in front of your face—before it disappears. ♦

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By Eric Lach

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Riverhead, 2022

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Hardeep sidhu, more online by hardeep sidhu.

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by Hernan Diaz

Reviewed by hardeep sidhu.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust , like his Pulitzer-finalist debut In the Distance (2017), is historical fiction that thrums with the energy of today’s crises. Diaz trains his eye on the wealthy New Yorkers of the Great Depression to tell a story of our time: capital’s inexorable march in the face of economic crisis. But Diaz avoids allegory in favor of enduring questions. Who holds wealth, and why? And how does capital—like a “living creature [ … ] following appetites of its own [ … ] trying to exercise its free will”—shape the stories we tell?

Trust revolves around a secretive wealthy couple, the Rasks. Benjamin has new money, Helen an old name. Their fortune grows in spite of—or perhaps because of—the 1929 stock market crash. An enraged public views Benjamin as “the hand behind the invisible hand.” The press depicts him as “a vampire, a vulture, or a pig.” Helen, insulated until now by her philanthropy, sees that “she would pay for the suffering that had helped make her husband rich beyond measure.” As the Rasks amass greater wealth, their private lives fall apart.

Stories about the Rasks proliferate, each of which Diaz captures through a kaleidoscopic structure. Trust consists of four sections: a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a private diary, each with its own author, audience, and agenda. The story unfolds in the interplay between these texts as much as within them.

I confess that the novel-within-a-novel conceit is a pet peeve of mine. All too often the embedded stories aren’t as good as their frames require them to be. But Bonds , the opening political novel-within-a-novel by the fictitious Harold Vanner, succeeds on its own terms before Diaz puts it to other uses. Matching the era’s writing, Vanner’s immersive novel evokes Edith Wharton’s perceptive eye and the muckrakers’ moral intensity. Finely sketched details accrete into compelling portraits. And the plot—a political fable about a capitalist’s hubris—builds steadily to a dramatic conclusion. And then Diaz starts the story over.

Like any good experimental novel, Trust —a clean, linear narrative until this point—shatters to fragments. And, as with any good detective novel, the reader must parse contradictory accounts, dodge red herrings, and hunt for clues to find the answers. For all his deep fascination with political economy, Diaz has written a well-paced, suspenseful novel. As readers, we end up trying to pin down the well-guarded secrets of society’s elite.

Subsequent sections reveal Benjamin and Helen Rask to be Andrew and Mildred Bevel, who write their own separate accounts to set the record straight. The novel’s longest section, and its heart, is a memoir by one Ida Partenza, a self-taught typist and daughter of an Italian anarchist, who comes to work for Andrew Bevel. Ida’s proletarian presence bursts the elite bubble we’ve only peered into until now. Soon, questions of complicity arise. Is there dignity in her work on behalf of capital? Or is her labor a betrayal in itself? The vivid meetings of Ida and Andrew remind me of Roberto Bolaño’s Father Urrutia, tasked with teaching Marxism to Pinochet. The power imbalances of a fractured society are embodied and dramatized in tense scenes. “‘Have your chowder,’” Andrew commands her during a fraught dinner conversation. “I had my chowder,” Ida recalls, without comment.

One of the novel’s preoccupations is misogyny, which cuts across political lines. Women hide their opinions from self-absorbed men. Such men, writes Ida, “all believed, without any sort of doubt, that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard.” The novel’s conservative men, of course, uphold the gender status quo. But the anti-capitalist and anarchist men of Trust , for all their critiques of self-interest and hierarchy, are complicit. Ida’s self-assured writing throws the gender politics of the novel into stark relief. And, in a bravura final section, Mildred Bevel—a fleeting, feminine presence in the men’s stories—finally has her say.

This intricate novel possesses a rare, fractal beauty: patterns first noticeable in the tiny twigs of its sentences recur in the branches of its sections and yet again in the shape of the whole. One character in Trust calls money a fiction. Finance capital, then, is “the fiction of a fiction.” And Trust , you might say, is the fiction of the fiction of a fiction, whose patterns extend well beyond its pages. Human lives rise and fall, but the greed of corporations and family fortunes persists. “Self-made” men trade on the stolen labor of women and the underclass. And the wealthy will stop at nothing—they will even “bend and align reality” itself—to tell their story in their own way. But, as Trust shows, theirs must not be the last word.

Published on August 9, 2022

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Midway through Hernan Diaz’s wondrous new novel, Trust , a wealthy financier sits at a desk, looking out of a high-rise window at a welder, suspended on a beam, who seems to be returning his gaze:

Each man appeared to be hypnotized by the other. But when the welder adjusted his cap and his coat, always staring at the man in the chair, I realized that, to him, the window was an impenetrable mirror.

Diaz recently told Vanity Fair that the idea for the novel began to form in his mind with this image of two men, each his own island—the rich man who cannot be seen; the worker whose view is obstructed. The “I” belongs to a woman who observes the scene while in the rich man’s office to interview for a secretarial position. She recounts it decades later in her memoir, from which this passage is drawn. And we—the readers of her nonfiction book within Diaz’s fictional one—take her at her word that the scene occurred just so.

Is there reason to doubt? Plenty. Trust incites mistrust from the very start. Its tantalizing table of contents promises four books, not one, each of which circles the lives of an early-twentieth-century financier named Andrew Bevel and his wife, Mildred, and calls into question the book that precedes it—a kind of Wall Street Rashomon . The first is a novel called “Bonds,” supposedly published in 1937 by Harold Vanner, who, like the other authors in the book, is invented by Diaz. Vanner’s main characters are a preternaturally gifted and morally deficient financier named Benjamin Rask and his brilliant, psychologically unsound wife, Helen, who we learn later in Trust are modeled on the Bevels. The second is “My Life,” a self-aggrandizing autobiography by Bevel, written the following year and left unfinished at his death. The third is “A Memoir, Remembered,” the book written in the 1990s by Ida Partenza, Bevel’s former secretary, in which she recounts her dealings with him during the writing of his autobiography as well as her strained relationship with her irascible anarchist father. Last is “Futures,” which consists of a handful of entries from the diary of Mildred Bevel, about which I will say little, to avoid spoiling Trust ’s ending.

Diaz is brilliant at dissecting literary conventions and transforming them into something new. Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, he spent most of his early childhood in Stockholm, where his family moved when he was two to escape the political situation in Argentina. During these years he spoke Spanish at home, with Swedish being his first “social tongue.” The family later returned to Argentina, but eventually, Diaz explained to Vanity Fair , he felt that he “wanted to live in English.” He moved first to London, then to Brooklyn. He took graduate seminars with Jacques Derrida at NYU , became an academic at Columbia, and wrote a book on Borges.

His first novel, In the Distance (2017), reinvigorated the western by placing at its center a young Swedish immigrant, Håkan Söderström, who lands in San Francisco during the gold rush and tries to make his way east, against the flow of westward expansion, to find his brother in New York. After escaping imprisonment in a mining town, he is rescued by a roving naturalist, Lorimer, who teaches him to appreciate the landscape and the species that inhabit it, as well as the interconnectedness of life.

But the more Håkan learns, the more he comes to feel that all travelers in the West, “himself included, were, in fact, intruders.” He encounters a band of settlers, with whom he travels for a while. When they are attacked by a religious militia, Håkan kills numerous men in self-defense, and the terrible awe he feels is the underside of the “ecstasy of existence” Lorimer inspires in him. Rather than finding himself an agent of conquest, as he might in a traditional western, he is crushed by guilt and the West’s totalizing violence. He recedes from his search for his brother and, largely, from the process of living.

In making Håkan the opposite of the archetypal cowboy hero, Diaz underscores the idea that we enter a story with expectations determined in part by each genre’s set of “rules.” “Vigilantism, greed, racism, and plunder are all romanticized in the Western,” he told The Paris Review Daily in 2017.

Because it whitewashes American history and offers a very attractive myth of the birth of this country, it should have become  the  national genre, [and yet] it has a marginal place in the literary canon…. It seemed like hijacking the Western was a perfect way to say something new about the United States and its history.

Diaz saw a similar opening for Trust , in which he addresses what he calls a “blind spot” in American literature: the upper-class social novel’s failure to critique the source of its characters’ wealth. Trust depicts not simply the lives of the moneyed elite but the process of enrichment—“the American money-maker in action,” as he puts it, in a phrase borrowed from Edith Wharton. Whereas the novels of Wharton, James, and Fitzgerald anatomize the agony and ecstasy of privilege and affluence but not the details of their accretion, the accumulation of money and its role as a driver of social forces occupy the minds of Diaz’s characters and advance much of the plot.

But the moneymaker in action is only part of Diaz’s overarching examination. In his interview with The Paris Review , he called attention to “another American genre, detective fiction,” noting that “it taught us…that reality is not given but needs to be deciphered.” The reader of Trust becomes a detective, not only comparing the four different accounts within the book but considering, too, how the forms—novel, autobiography, memoir, and diary—render these perspectives as distinct expressions of “truth.” For Diaz’s characters, their choice of form is as revealing of motive and persona as the words on the page.

Harold Vanner’s “Bonds” is not a rags-to-riches story, as its opening line makes clear: “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.” A lonely child born into great wealth in the 1870s and orphaned just before he reaches adulthood, Rask excels in school but has few recognizable personal qualities beyond a dispassionate “reluctance to associate” with others. At his father’s funeral, Vanner writes, “relatives and acquaintances alike were impressed by Benjamin’s composure, but the truth was that mourning simply had given the natural dispositions of his character a socially recognizable form.”

Rask has no interest in his family’s tobacco business and he soon sells it off. He is drawn instead to the world of finance, or, as Vanner later describes it, “the incestuous genealogies of money—capital begetting capital begetting capital.” Finding that he has an innate talent for discerning patterns in the abstraction of financial speculation, Rask sets out to invest on his own, and his work, if it can be called that, consumes him. He thinks about wealth the way a pyromaniac thinks about fire: “He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body.” The methods by which it can be accrued define his vision of the world: countries around the globe, equally ripe for plunder and manipulation, become a “unified territory” and “things and people [merge] into one single machine.”

Vanner portrays Rask as a callous figure, an embodiment of the soullessness of Gilded Age capitalism. He is like J.P. Morgan, who said, “I owe the public nothing,” and John D. Rockefeller, who lived the principle “Silence is golden.” Unsociable and secretive, Rask offers no persona to society or the general populace, and in that void, rumors breed. He is “mortified at the mere thought of being considered an eccentric” and decides to create a superficial identity. He builds a Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue, joins an assortment of clubs and boards he doesn’t engage with, and has his assistant throw parties he himself does not attend. “In the end,” Vanner writes, “he became a wealthy man playing the part of a wealthy man.”

Diaz’s descriptions of Wall Street wheeling and dealing in the first part of “Bonds” are nimble. “New York swelled with the loud optimism of those who believe they have outpaced the future,” he writes of the buoyancy that preceded the Panic of 1907. But “Bonds” isn’t Diaz’s novel exactly; it’s Vanner’s—and the reader can’t help but be aware of a certain artifice. Who is Vanner and why has his book been included here?

In the second part of “Bonds”—which, like Trust , is divided into four sections—Vanner tells the story of Helen Brevoort, who comes from a well-regarded Albany family of diminished means, kept afloat by Mrs. Brevoort’s social dexterity. Mr. Brevoort takes his young daughter’s education in hand, feeding her impressive intellect with an eccentric curriculum, including biblical hermeneutics, occultism, American Transcendentalism, German aphorisms, and the teachings of the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg.

When Helen is still a child, the family embarks for Europe. As Mr. Brevoort falls deeper into theosophy and arcana, Mrs. Brevoort uses Helen’s polymath talents as an entertaining lure to gain access to the circles of well-to-do expats. Helen discovers an escape in solitude. “She knew, then,” Vanner writes, “that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.”

The sundering of Europe by World War I coincides with Mr. Brevoort’s psychic break—his thoughts “curved and curled on themselves,” Vanner writes, echoing his description of Rask’s obsession with the contortions of money—and he is deposited at the Medico-Mechanic Institute at Bad Pfäfers in Switzerland. Rask’s unctuous assistant, also stranded by the war, attempts to court Helen, now a teenager, and through him Mrs. Brevoort finagles transport for herself and Helen back to New York and an invitation to a soiree at Rask’s mansion.

The moment Helen and Rask meet is marvelously underwhelming—it’s an aptly awkward encounter involving two people who are barely there: he, “a slender man standing on the shore of invisibility”; she, sheltered in “the shadowy fringes of the room.” As a married couple, their companionship is predicated on a mutual desire for reclusion, which money can readily supply, and their most intimate moments are those in which they can be together but alone, at private recitals in the mansion, for instance, “sharing emotions for which they were not responsible and which did not refer directly to the two of them.” Their bond, to use Vanner’s title, is more an alliance than a marriage, a version of Rask’s social strategy of being seen without actually being present.

Rask’s wealth soars throughout the Roaring Twenties. The optimism that precedes the Great Depression is a “wonderful collective dream” with opportunities “for anyone who saw and took them,” according to Vanner. When the crash occurs, Rask’s financial machinations bring about the ruination of countless working people. “Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats,” Vanner interjects, pulling the reader to his side with the first-person plural. “We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.” Rask is pilloried in the press for reputedly orchestrating the crash, but his astonishing acumen is irresistible to his fellow financiers, who revere him even as they despise him.

At the same time, Helen becomes collateral damage in Rask’s financial predations. She has a crisis of conscience, initiated by a moment of public humiliation (though it’s unclear whether the scene takes place primarily in her mind). Vanner writes that she is ready to “atone” for the causes of the crash and adds, “She would pay for the suffering that had helped make her husband rich beyond measure.” The promise of punishment strikes an oddly personal note, muddling the distinction between character and author. Does the impulse originate with Helen or with Vanner, who seems to want to castigate her? She crumbles from guilt and paranoia, rambling through the mansion, mumbling incoherently, and writing obsessively in her diaries, as Rask observes her cautiously. “Lost in the new tyrannical architecture of her brain,” Vanner writes, and afflicted by severe eczema, she asks to be deposited at the same Swiss hospital as her father, who disappeared from its grounds years before.

In the final part of “Bonds,” the stifling ostentation of the Fifth Avenue mansion is supplanted by the panorama of the Swiss mountain landscape as the Rasks travel to Bad Pfäfers. Helen receives two brutal electroshock treatments, appears to improve, and then dies suddenly. By the time of her death, she has become “a thing broken and abandoned, exhausted of being.” She’s been ground in the mill, to borrow from James, but to what end? It’s puzzling that Vanner spent so many pages developing Helen, only to dispatch her in a way that seems mechanistic, a tool for doling out punishment to Rask without having to deal with him directly.

A review later in Trust argues that “Bonds” is an epigone of Wharton and James, but even in imitation, Vanner’s treatment of Helen comes up short—she doesn’t get to be an Isabel Archer, much less a Countess Olenska. Rask, too, fizzles out. He returns to New York but cannot reproduce his earlier financial success. His ending, and the last line of “Bonds,” is surprisingly prosaic, as he briefly looks back on his life: “While that young person had believed he would renounce everything in favor of his calling, this aging man was sure he had given life a fair try.”

Vanner’s novel is an enjoyable yet minor work of American literary realism, but it’s a masterpiece in comparison with the book that follows it. Andrew Bevel’s autobiography, purportedly written in 1938 in response to Vanner’s novel and left incomplete when Bevel dies of a heart attack that same year, is the kind of humblebrag a man would write if he credited himself with a “pioneering spirit,” unique business acumen, and exceptional foresight. A modern comparison might be the billionaire Charles Koch’s Good Profit (2015), which uses his riches-to-riches autobiography to frame a disingenuous theory of corporate management and social responsibility. The writer Lydia Kiesling’s description of Koch’s book as one that “elides the thrill of acquisition for the appearance of rectitude” could also serve as a summary of Bevel’s effort, as could her assessment that such a trade produces dull results.

Although more loquacious than Rask, Bevel is undeniably the model for Vanner’s antihero, and Bevel has a bone to pick with the author, without naming Vanner or his novel directly. “What matters is the tally of our accomplishments, not the tales about us,” he declares in his preface. His efforts to refute the rumors about him include, above all, mending the reputation of his late wife, Mildred, who, Bevel insists, is grossly misrepresented by her fictional counterpart, Helen. But first, he drags his reader through accounts of his storied male ancestors, his education and early years, and his business dealings. On his grandfather:

He possessed all the qualities commonly attached to men of intellectual genius. He was absentminded, withdrawn and focused on his work to the detriment of the most basic everyday tasks, at which he was charmingly inept.

On women investors:

Women represented only 1.5 per cent of the dilettantish speculators at the beginning of the decade. At the end they neared 40 per cent. Could there have been a clearer indicator of the disaster to come?

What motivates a person to write an autobiography? The form is usually self-serving in some sense—not only in what the author remembers but why. Bevel writes that “no enterprise can fully succeed without a true understanding of human behavior,” but his book fails utterly on this score. He credits Mildred with being a clear-eyed helpmeet but patronizes her almost instantly, repeatedly citing her “innocent wisdom” and noting that his “methodical approach reined in her understandable passion.”

Throughout, Bevel shifts blame with one hand and takes credit with the other. “It is impossible for one single person or group to control the market,” he writes, and then claims, “My actions safeguarded American industry and business.” The parallel with Trump’s “I alone can fix it” isn’t coincidental; Diaz wrote Trust during his presidency, and Bevel is as baldly transactional.

The fragmentary state of Bevel’s autobiography is a clever way for Diaz to reveal the character’s preoccupations. “Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy,” Bevel writes. In the currency of words, he’s a big spender when defending his profiteering, and parsimonious in a chapter he calls “Restoring Our Values,” which consists of only a few notes: “Recent achievements, since Mildred’s passing. Prospering despite grief and hostile political conditions. List.”

Vanner may have adapted and embellished elements of the Bevels’ lives for his novel, but Bevel also picks and chooses what to mention. It is telling that the chapter on his college years consists of some half-dozen unelaborated notes on formative relationships (“making lasting friends and testing character”) and that the chapter titled “Apprenticeship” is completely blank. Another chapter, called “Benefactress,” ends in a sentence fragment that highlights Bevel’s egotism:

Proof of the Mildred Bevel Charitable Fund’s success is that it thrives to this day, improving the lives of both budding and established artists all over the country. And I

Diaz’s choice of the dubious names Vanner and Bevel—suggestive of “conceit” and “slanted”—makes twins of the characters, as though they are two sides of the same coin. His placement of their books right next to each other in Trust makes it seem as though Vanner and Bevel are wielding their separate versions of reality like weapons, each believing his to be closer to the truth—Vanner’s in spirit, Bevel’s in factual detail—though Vanner’s motives remain unknown. In any case, the argument between them is moot. Autobiography, like fiction, doesn’t imitate life—it is a construction of life, a representation of it, and one in which imagination can be mistaken for memory.

In these pages, Dwight Macdonald described “parajournalism” as “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.” * This form is at work in Ida Partenza’s memoir, which follows Bevel’s autobiography in Trust . Because of its supposed grounding in fact, her account feels authoritative, but with Trust ’s succession of unreliable perspectives, the reader is alert to signs that she might be availing herself of creative freedom.

“So much of what I have written over the past decades is a ciphered version of the story of that relationship,” she says of her time with Bevel. Now seventy, with a writing career behind her, she claims to have undertaken the memoir in order “to look for the answers to the enigmas I thought had to be left unresolved so they could feed my work.” Her glimpses into the past are framed by her present-day excursion to the Bevel mansion, recently opened as a museum housing the Andrew and Mildred Bevel papers.

In her twenties, Partenza explains, she became Bevel’s amanuensis in the writing of his book. When she applied to work for him she created her own identity, inventing a fake name and backstory, and lived a kind of double life, keeping the details of her job secret and separate from her home life in Brooklyn. Her father lectures her on Marx and thinks secretarial work is demeaning, “another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men,” yet he freely ignores the housework, leaving dirty dishes in the sink for her to clean. After she secures the job—following a demeaning interview process in which the final applicants are all of a similar physical type—Bevel explains that she will take dictation as he narrates his life story, to counter the “libelous trash” of Vanner’s novel.

As Bevel’s secretary, Partenza not only types his notes but ends up creating much of the material about Mildred from whole cloth. She writes a scene for Mildred that is straight out of her own past—retelling detective stories to her father over dinner—and later, Bevel recounts the story back to a shocked Partenza as if drawing from his store of memories. As Bevel edits Partenza’s manuscript of his autobiography, he reshapes it, “bending and aligning reality,” he tells her, for “reality needs to be consistent.”

But the reality of all of Trust , up to this point, has been realigned. Bevel’s autobiography is the product of Partenza’s employment, and his book, “My Life,” is thrown into a freshly uncertain light. So, too, is our understanding of its relationship with Vanner’s novel. The scenes that the reader understood to be Bevel’s refutation of the details in “Bonds” may not even have come from Bevel. The slipperiness between Trust ’s different forms and their truthfulness is expounded by Partenza’s father in an angry speech that has a clear contemporary resonance:

Fiction harmless? Look at religion. Fiction harmless? Look at the oppressed masses content with their lot because they have embraced the lies imposed on them. History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That’s what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money. Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support. Unanimously.

If reality can be so manipulated, what part of any of these “books” can be trusted? Both Vanner and Bevel do a kind of violence to their female characters with an assuredness Partenza recognizes in her reading of biographies of “Great Men”: “They all believed, without any sort of doubt, that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard.” She knows from her research that Mildred isn’t the “haunted woman” of Vanner’s novel, nor is she “the insubstantial shadow” Bevel insisted upon for his account.

But Partenza herself isn’t immune to the lure of the writer’s authority. When she discovers one of Mildred’s diaries among the museum’s holdings, a volume called “Futures” that becomes the fourth book of Trust , she steals it. So cozy has she become with her subject that she, too, begins to merge her story with Mildred’s and take license with the latter:

I am bothered by how easy it is to convince myself that I have a right to this notebook. (Who knows Mildred better than I? Didn’t I even forge her a past out of my own? Are we not then, in some oblique way, connected?)

In “Bonds,” as Helen Rask’s mental illness intensifies, Vanner has her record her decline in her diaries:

She hoped her future self, the one reading her diaries, would be able to use those writings as a measure of how far into her delirium she had gone. Would she see herself on the page?

Yet Mildred Bevel, the model for Helen, goes largely unknown in the first three books that make up Diaz’s novel; she likely wouldn’t recognize herself in any of them. Point of view, Diaz told The Paris Review , is related to power, and we all want the power to tell our own stories. In Mildred’s diary, as she details her daily activities and impressions, she muses on the nature of kitsch, and her summary reads as a quietly thrilling rebuke to the rest of the novel:

A copy that’s so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there’s more worth in this closeness than in originality itself…. Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original…has to be turned into a fake…so that the latter may provide the measure of the former’s beauty.

At the beginning of her diary, Mildred is reading Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark . But her contribution to Trust made me think of Rhys’s later novel Wide Sargasso Sea , which responds to and amends Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre , reconstructing Brontë’s madwoman in the attic as a full-fledged character. As the last book and the shortest, Mildred’s diary has the quality of an emendation. She gets the last word, and I read her book as being the true one—she wrote it herself, for herself—but is it? Why should her account be any more trustworthy than the others? Even diaries can be written with an eye to posterity.

Nested realities and questions around authenticity are Borgesian hallmarks, and in an interview with LitHub Diaz said, “I wouldn’t be the person I am without Borges.” But Diaz reminds me more of Vladimir Nabokov. Their works share, among other things, the unreliability of dueling narrators, a dexterous self-consciousness, a knowing artifice, and the primacy of “reality.” Nabokov said that the heroine of his novel The Gift (1938) is not a person but Russian literature itself. Diaz’s subject is American literature—not its genres, though he does work within those, but the principles that animate the American imagination. In his novels, Diaz has punctured two of the defining characteristics of American history: rugged individualism and the exceptionalism of capitalist enterprise.

The play of forms and factuality in Trust —the very question of trustworthiness in varieties of literary representation—conjures another American theme: reinvention. For her job application, Partenza composes what she calls a “prospective autobiography,” “since most of my life lay in the future,” writing her life as she might like to see it unfold. Mildred puts it another way in her diary: “The ticker fell behind me, and for a few minutes I owned the future.”

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Trust by Hernan Diaz review – playful portrait of a Gatsby-like tycoon

When did wealth become the defining element of American success? This Booker-longlisted novel is a multilayered interrogation of ‘the fiction of money’

H ow is reality funded?” asks the wealthy tycoon at the centre of Hernan Diaz’s Booker-longlisted second novel. His answer is “fiction” – specifically, the “fiction of money”. The value of any commodity comes from us buying into its wider narrative. Unless we trust that a banknote “represents concrete goods”, it is just a piece of printed paper, as open to distortion as a novel, or a memoir, or a diary.

Trust incorporates all three of these literary forms. As with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Richard Powers’s The Overstory , its structure relies on interconnected narratives which deepen and destabilise one another. Diaz’s first novel, the Pulitzer prize finalist In the Distance , was about a penniless young Swedish immigrant meeting swindlers and fanatics in California. In Trust, he has built a postmodern version of a historical novel around a character at the other end of the economic scale – a Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York who dutifully hosts lavish parties at which he is rarely glimpsed. His name is Andrew Bevel, a guy who becomes “a wealthy man by playing the part of a wealthy man”. At his side is his seemingly longsuffering wife, Mildred, a figure occasionally reminiscent of Zelda Fitzgerald. The Bevels’s marriage is built around a “core of quiet discomfort”, a shared awkwardness which for them is “inherent to most exchanges”. If every get-rich tale is ultimately a crime narrative – a story of whodunnit, how and why – the central heist in Trust is the Wall Street crash of 1929 . By embracing the American spirit of “fake it till you make it”, Bevel finds that the financial crisis makes him even richer. Indeed, some New Yorkers start to claim that he caused it.

There is nothing wealthy individuals love less than a scandal – a moment when the reins of narrative-making slip out of their hands. Diaz’s own structure enacts this. The first part of Trust is a novel-within-the-novel: a fictionalised telling of the New York power couple’s lives. But that’s just the setup for the book’s second section, which presents itself as an autobiography by Mr Bevel himself. Like all vanity projects by unintentionally amusing millionaires, the purpose is “to address and refute” the fictions about him, setting the historical record straight once and for all. What unfolds is a hilarious send-up of the celebrity memoir, complete with a generic and self-aggrandising title (My Life), a heavy dose of misleading platitudes (“my wife was too fragile, too good for this world”), and occasional glimpses of the unabashed capitalist mentality underneath (“what matters is the tally of our accomplishments, not the tales about us”). Bevel’s later chapters descend into random notes towards a future draft we know this big shot mercifully lacks the self-awareness to finish (“WHOLE SECTION: ‘Clouds Thicken’ ?”).

The third section of Diaz’s book brings about another change of weather: it is a young Brooklyn woman’s account of meeting the ageing financier during the Great Depression, and being hired to help tell his story. At this point we begin to feel we are getting a handle on the Citizen Kane -style mystery driving the book: who was this tycoon, actually? And was his wife really just an accessory on his arm? But the novel’s fourth and final section pulls the rug from under us one last time, offering us fragments from Mildred’s long-withheld diary. Trust poses questions of authorship and ownership at every turn: when did wealth become the defining element of every American success story? What values and costs can be ascribed to the “Great Man” theory of history? And to whom do such men owe their greatest debts? If you imagine a brilliantly twisted mix of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Virginia Woolf’s journals, JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello , and Ryan Gosling’s breaking of the fourth wall in The Big Short, you’ll get some sense of the surprising hybrid Diaz has created.

It is perhaps telling that Diaz started his writing life with a scholarly text about Jorges Luis Borges, who once wrote that money represents “a panoply of possible futures”. A Borgesian sense of play imbues almost every page of Trust, along with a dash of Italo Calvino’s love of exploring different versions of a single idea or city. Through perfectly formed sentences and the skilful unpicking of certainties, Trust creates a great portrait of New York across an entire century of change – a metropolis that is “the capital of the future”, yet consists of citizens who are “nostalgic by nature”. A city that, in other words, looks backwards and forwards at the same time – as any place that mixes old money and new money must. Trust is so packed full of ironies that it can sometimes feel airless. But it is also a work possessed of real power and purpose. It invites us to think about why the category of imaginative play we most heavily reward as a society is the playing of financial markets, often at a heavy cost. It’s a testament to Diaz’s cunning abilities as a writer that you end his book thinking that – if truth is your goal – you might be better off relying on a novelist than a banker.

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