“Trust” is the book that betrays its name, and it’s wonderful
New York City’s illustrious borough of Manhattan is the apex of wealth. Its million-dollar skyscrapers, cutthroat financial sector and charging bull-run street make it a perfect petri dish for opulent individuals to thrive like the Gatsby-reminiscent magnates of the 1920s or the yuppies of the 1980s. German philosopher and economist Karl Marx proclaimed that money is the god of all commodities. “Manhattan is the holy city” for followers of the divine asset.
That’s what Hernan Diaz says about the Empire City in his sophomore novel “Trust,” which mixes the page-turning, investigative aspects of Agatha Christie stories with the rigid economic reviews of Earl Sparling. An analysis of empires and erasures, men and women, the imposing fantasy of Wall Street and the dichotomy between immense fortunes and misery, Diaz’s new American epic demonstrates an impressive willingness to experiment with structure making it a sensationally fun read.
The 50-year-old author's first novel, “In the Distance,” published in 2017, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. “Trust” accomplishes what his debut could not and more. Published on May 3, 2022, the historical fiction novel gave the Argentinian novelist a victory by winning both the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and the 2022 Booker Prize.
A novel, a partial memoir, a memoir of that memoir and a journal are the pieces that comprise this literary matryoshka. This metafiction structure sounds as if it would lead to a convoluted mess, but Diaz masterfully avoids creating confusion by weaving each story together in a careful cross-stitch of plot points. What ties each narrative together is a curiosity to reveal the intricacies of a childless, affluent Manhattan couple’s private life and what it means to trust others in an avaricious society that encourages facades for the sake of power.
The opening section, titled “Bonds,” is presented as a Wharton-esque fiction novel set in the 1920s by Harold Vanner in 1937, which describes the rise of a genius but antisocial Wall Street titan named Benjamin Rask and his equally brilliant and reserved wife, Helen, who slowly begin to lose their place as pillars in New York’s high society when the Great Depression strikes. The end of Vanner’s tragic tale shows Helen falling victim to a diagnosis of hysteria and being subjugated to horrifically archaic psychiatric treatments of the time, which cause her death, leading to Benjamin’s downfall as a result of grief and guilt.
A character in “Trust” says that sometimes stories lack “little details and verbal trinkets to bribe the readers into believing what they are reading is true.” Diaz does not have this problem. Throughout the first section of this capitalist fable, we are bombarded with textbook facts about the events leading up to the Great Depression that would sound drab in any other context. But, Diaz makes up for these academic blocks of text by interlacing them with intimate details about the Rask couple, like specific oddities in their personalities and subtle mannerisms only lovers can catch in each other.
The book's second section, an incomplete autobiographical manuscript by Andrew Bevel in 1938 titled “My Life,” reveals that the fake financier described in “Bonds” was based on him and his wife, Mildred, who died the previous year from cancer. Enraged by his depiction, Andrew aims to reclaim his family’s reputation while destroying Harold Vanner’s career.
A motif threaded throughout “Trust” is that one can “bend and align reality” with the right amount of power. Andrew embodies this by using his wealth to erase Harold off the shelves and embroil him in a lifetime of lawsuits. For Diaz, this theme gives us a peek into his writing philosophy. Possessing the power of the pen, Diaz uses his gift to take on the role of a false historian, encouraging the reader to forget true American history for a split second and believe that Andrew Bevel’s empire was once real.
The main conjectures provided in the novel's beginning half are written from the viewpoint of powerful, white male financiers who believe that “they deserved to be heard.” The second half of the novel shifts to the female perspective at a time when women were entering the workforce after the Great Depression, developing a stronger sense of autonomy and identity. Diaz showcases his effortless and vertigo-inducing ability to contort his voice through a sudden tonal shift that possesses poignant vulnerability.
Andrew’s assistant, Ida Partenza, writes “A Memoir, Remembered,” revealing that she ghost-wrote the tycoon’s memoir. Here, Diaz excellently captures the milieu of the rich – the hush, the quiet and the aura of awe and invincibility it exudes — through lacing subtle tensions between Andrew and Ida, which reveals Andrew’s unwillingness to answer questions about his wife and insistence to portray her as a fragile and timid housewife.
Diaz depicts wealth as a monster consuming everything, even those who fight against it. Ida is an innate writer whose father was a typist and a devout communist who instilled in her the belief that financiers were the “root of all social injustice." Yet, she finds herself submitting to one and fulfilling his wishes to rewrite history. We only hear Ida’s voice through the framework of Andrew’s legacy. “My Life” is Ida’s work disguised as Andrew’s idealized voice. She is not even the subject of her memoir; instead, memories of Andrew hijack it.
The final and most intimate section of "Trust" unveils Mildred's private journal. Written before her death, “Futures” serves as a dizzying crescendo of a conclusion. Mildred knows her cancer is going to win. She knows she has no future left, so she records her mundane past and present with melancholic poeticism.
Finding out the truth about Mildred’s persona leads the reader to emit a slight sigh of disappointment about how obvious the answer was all along, but this is not a weakness in Diaz’s writing. It does the opposite, showing how immaculately clean yet dynamic Diaz staged the setup.
Diaz writes in this opus that when producing text, each line should be “composed…like they were melodic lines.” The New York University alumnus’s prose certainly does sing. His written voice rings like an erudite aria. What’s underplayed by Harold is bellowed by Andrew, provided nuance by Ida, and given a plot twist by Mildred.
“Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered,” Mildred writes. Diaz provides a poignantly penned glimmer of hope that unheard voices aren’t destined to dissipate into a void and deserve to be shared and echoed into the atmosphere one day, as reality can only be bent to a certain extent before the truth prevails.
This article was submitted as an assignment for the Reporting Capstone course at UT Austin taught by Professor Kevin Robbins.