TRUST (2022)
By Hernan Diaz
Riverhead Books, 416 pages.
★★★
Trust was long-listed for the Booker Prize. That strikes me as about right for an intriguing but highly uneven novel. In a manner of speaking, it really is about finance. It is told in four parts: “Bonds,” “My Life,” “A Memoir, Remembered,” and “Futures.”
The first part is a novel-within-a-novel penned by (the fictional) Harold Vanner. This section calls to mind classics such as The Rise of Silas Lapham and Martin Dressler, with dashes of Howard Hughes tossed in. It follows Benjamin Rask, the heir to a tobacco fortune. At the end of the Gilded Age Rask foresees that finance is a better route to fortune, off-loads the family business, and becomes a Wall Street tycoon. He quickly gains a reputation for being as prescient as contemporaries such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In some ways, he’s even more astute as he manipulates markets before World War One and pivots again just before the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Rask is a workaholic recluse and seeks a wife with the same qualities. He finds her in Helen Brevoort, though she begins to show distressing signs of sociability by holding concerts and soirees at the Rask mansion. Alas, Helen collapses emotionally and is shuttled off to a Swiss sanitarium where she is subjected to gruesome non-cures. Tragedy.
“My Life” is the memoir notes of Andrew Bevel, the novel’s “real-life” Benjamin Rask. It has a very different tone–flat, in fact–and Bevel emerges as even more of a genius than in Vanner’s novel. Bevel’s wife Mildred, though, is stripped all suggestions of mental imbalance. “My Life” is really little more than a prose outline with lacunae, but we can see that Bevel has an unimaginative imagination. Call this one egoism.
“A Memoir, Remembered” brings Ida Partenza into the picture to recount events that occur during the 1930s Great Depression. Ida lives in a run-down section of Brooklyn with her widowed typesetter/printer father whose attitude toward money is as cavalier as one might expect for an anarchist weaned on events such as the 1912 Lawrence Bread and Roses strike and the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti. He is an Italian immigrant who prefers to call himself an “exile.” Ida is more practical; she changes her surname to Prentice to gain an interview in Bevel’s office. He sees through her guise, but hires her to ghostwrite his memoir to “correct” the efforts of Vanner, whom Bevel despises.
Bevel is even more egotistical than his outline suggests and Mildred is reduced to a saintly appendage to his genius. He pays well and Ida is solicitous of Bevel, though she doubts the veracity of both halves of her assignment, the puff piece and the hagiography. I am tempted to characterize this section as delusional.
The final section is set in 1966 and finds Ida a respected author touring the Bevel home–think a high-rise version of Manhattan’s Frick Museum–years after Andrew’s death. She sifts a few memories and spills a few revelations based upon having found and painstakingly deciphered Mildred’s diary. Realism?
Hernan Diaz attempted an ambitious novel that touches upon topics such as taming bohemianism, identity erasure, prescriptive gender roles, betrayal, love of mammon, and rewriting history. He has a great story to tell, but parts of the novel simply don’t work. “My Life’ is one of them. Diaz painted himself into a literary corner in that he needed to establish Andrew Bevel’s livid anger toward Vanner yet also alert readers that he was incapable of penning an autobiography on his own. Diaz’s instincts were good, but the section is akin to reading an annotated list, hardly anyone’s idea of engrossing reading. In my judgment, Diaz could have folded select details from section two into section three; in essence, write of Ida to poring over Bevel’s notes and commenting on Bevel’s turgid prose and disjointed thoughts. This is especially the case given that Ida’s discussions with Bevel repeat things we’ve already read.
There is a similar need for paring and elimination of repetition throughout. I seldom recommend such a thing, but don’t be afraid to skim same old/same old sections. At 416 pages Trust is a good novel; at 325 it might have been a great one. Or at least one that made it to the Booker short list.
Rob Weir
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