Trust: Tension Between Competing Narratives

Title: Trust

Author: Hernan Diaz

 

A Brief Summary from the Publisher

 

"Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts." 

 

The Initial Conversational Scrimmage

 

We started our session with a tour of our host Linda's new digs, admiring the view and trying to overcome our jealousy. Finally settled into our spots, we let the conversation take its natural course before digging in to the book. Topics during our Non-book-related Conversation Half Hour included the well-being of Shirley, who was unable to join us, the internet activity of young people, this blog and whether it should move to Substack, and cheerful things people have been reading that have lifted their spirits during a dark time. Warm cookies were involved. Finally, Linda threw down the Joanne Von Blon gauntlet, declaring "This is a book club," and after light resistance, we got down to business.

 

Alert: The Following Conversation is Made Up Entirely of Spoilers

 

If you have not yet read this book, stop reading now. Much of the pleasure inherent in reading this work lies in the surprises it holds. We would hate to be responsible for ruining anything for you, so just know you have been warned. 

 

Insights and Opinions

 

+  Trust opens with Bonds, a 124-page novel within a novel written by Harold Vanner. Vanner's work is an old-fashioned tale, with long descriptions of events and people and no dialogue. It's a style that's foreign to most modern fiction and takes a bit of patience. Here we meet financial wizard Benjamin Rask and his brilliant wife Helen, learning the story of their rise to incredible wealth and societal importance, Helen's slide into mental illness and eventual death, and Benjamin's subsequent fall from grace. It's a heartbreaking story of two mismatched people, committed to yet incapable of connecting to each other. 

 

+ The book is constructed of four parts, each of which disrupts what the reader thinks they've learned from the prior section. In section two, the fictional Benjamin and Helen Rask are revealed to be the real-life Andrew and Mildred Bevel by Andrew himself. We read Andrew's partial under-construction autobiography, filled with his notes and blanks to be filled in later. Through his writing, he is determined to undo what he believes to be the vicious lies about him in Vanner's thinly veiled portrait of the Bevels. What's most instructive is that his blanks and notes call for more description of what a brilliant financial mind he is and include dismissive, short calls for "something more here" about Mildred's life as his housekeeper and help meet.

 

+ In the third section, we meet Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian printer and anarchist, who comes to work as a typist for Andrew Bevel as he works on his autobiography. It is here that we start to piece together the reality of what has actually occurred. Ida's typing, under pressure from Bevel, transforms into the creation of original material as she is pressed into "filling in the little details" that require her to create facts out of whole cloth. Under pressure from Bevel, Ida creates his character on the page by stitching together ideas she gleans by reading the biographies of the titans of the time.

 

+ And finally, in the fourth section, Mildred is allowed to speak for herself. Taken as a whole, the novel is a puzzle box within a puzzle box and, ultimately, it's left to the reader to uncover the whole truth.

 

+ For our group, the book's structure posed a challenge. Several of us admitted to trying this book "awhile ago" and then setting it aside. For those readers, the first Vanner section was the stopper. They weren't drawn in. Those who stuck with it fully all agreed that the book is remarkable. Four of us have read it more than once and those who have all feel it's even better the second time around. One has to complete all sections and hear from Mildred before grasping that she is the financial genius and the sole reason for Andrew's success.

 

+ As Liz put it, "Reading the first section, I thought 'what is this?' It's kind of a tale. There's no dialogue. Then, in the second section, I thought 'oh, now I get it.' But then in the third section, I realized I didn't get it at all." Linda asked if any of us had guessed that Mildred was the financial genius rather than Andrew before all is revealed at the end, but most of us had not. 

 

+ Diaz's skill at allowing clues to intrude carefully is remarkable. Per Margy: "When you realize what he (Diaz) is doing, you realize how brilliant it is. "In section three, when Ida and Bevel are sharing a meal at the mansion, Bevel fondly relates his memories of Mildred summarizing for him over dinner the plot of the latest mystery she's read. But we know these are not his memories. They are Ida's memories of dinners with her father, shared with Bevel. Lois pointed out that the fact that he can so easily purloin someone else's story and claim it as his own opens a horrifying door into how little he knew or valued his wife. 

 

+ Vicky made a comparison between Bevel and Ida's anarchist father. Afraid to tell her father that's she's gone to work for a wealthy tycoon, she eventually confesses and then must sit through a long Marxist diatribe. Through this conversation, we see both men as equally hard-headed and stuck in their own positions.

 

+ Mildred's own words in the final section are ephemeral and a bit inscrutable. So much of the book is about her and yet she is not really there, until she has a chance to speak for herself. And when she does speak for herself, her sentences are mere moments and wisps. Hearing bells from her spot in a sanatorium turns into notes about short-selling folding back time and songs played in reverse. We don't understand. But we do find a bit about Andrew. "Finally had to tell Andrew about illness," she writes. "He seemed more concerned about his solitude than my absence. Still, he was a good companion." And, she tells us "Priest came with soggy offerings of comfort. God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions." Blanche noted that the novel is very womancentric, even though the primary woman is mostly missing from its pages. 

 

+ Reviews of Trust were not universally positive. Hillary Kelly pilloried it in the L.A. Times. To quote that review: "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." Piffle, we say.

 

+ Overall, we agreed this is a brilliant book and a very worthwhile read. "This is the best book I've read in ten years," said Chris. 

 

Our Next Reads 

 

As you will recall, we had originally planned to read The Bee Sting for October. But we' decided to save that for a future meeting. For October, we will be reading two works:

 

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans

 

Canoeing the Boundary Waters Wilderness, by Stephen Wilbers

 

Jocey will host our next session. 

 

Hanging out by the fireplace in Linda's new home.