Trust by Hernan Diaz — enigmatic variations

While reading Trust, Hernan Diaz’s sharp and affecting second novel, I found myself thinking of Max de Winter. One of the most interesting aspects of Rebecca s the way Daphne du Maurier treats her readers like the naive second Mrs de Winter. The hinge of the novel, that Rebecca was in fact a complete dragon, rotates on the word of Max. Everyone else thought she was a tonic, yet we blindly believe the man who killed her. Such persuasive — almost hypnotic — storytelling provides the thrust of Trust, in which Diaz illustrates how a fine provenance can engender an absurd belief in a tall tale.

Trust provides several accounts of the marriage of notorious Wall Street financier Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred, a couple at the epicentre of Manhattan’s social, political and economic circles during the Roaring Twenties. Bevel is fictional but leans heavily on real-life figures such as Jesse Livermore, chancers who shorted the market before the Great Depression.

The novel is structured as a sequence of four short books. The first is “Bonds”, a novella written by Harold Vanner, one of Mildred’s friends. In its lead characters, Benjamin and Helen Rask, Vanner creates fictional avatars of the Bevels that amount to a monstrous husband and a tortured wife. Not content with describing Benjamin’s mistreatment of Helen, climaxing in her death in the early 1930s, Vanner makes him the architect of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Some of this adheres to the story of Andrew and Mildred, some of it does not.

Vanner’s fiction within a fiction sets the tone for Diaz’s novel of versions: subsequent angles are provided by an attempt at a self-justifying autobiography by Andrew; a sleuthing memoir by his ghostwriter, Ida Partenza; and finally Mildred’s voice, emerging from the grave in a short journal discovered half a century later. This quartet of narratives works like a combination lock: by revisiting events we recognise pressures imposed and felt and truth click into place. We also see how capital can “bend and align reality”.

Of all these variations on a theme, Ida’s is the most reliable and human. The daughter of an Italian anarchist, she is used to subterfuge and its mechanisms. As she types up Andrew’s account, embellishing it on his orders, she reads between the lines and realises that there is more to Mildred than the wallflower being projected. “Perhaps the truth was in all these distortions and inaccuracies,” suggests Ida.

Bevel’s bombast is filtered through Ida’s time in the New York Public Library reading “lengthy profiles of financiers, industrialists and patrician families”. Echoing the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, Bevel delivers ironclad assertions such as “our prosperity is proof of our virtue”. Part of the pleasure in reading Trust is in trying to work out where Andrew’s arrogance ends and his ghostwriter’s flair begins. Ida ably parrots the magnate format of egotism cloaked in self-deprecation, philanthropy and the quiet suggestion of genius. Today’s tycoons fill bookshelves with similar material.

Diaz’s great subject is the scale of American mythmaking. His debut novel, In the Distance, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, unpicked the origin story of the American west in the 1850s, reframing it as a surreal landscape. In Trust, Diaz addresses a different kind of gold rush. He captures the swagger of the robber barons and the early days of late capitalism, as the seductive allure of playing the stocks shows its teeth. What might seem a less dramatic milieu than the wagon trains and gun-toting prospectors of his debut in fact delivers an oppressively baroque atmosphere of intrigue and moral funk.

It is in his ugly-beautiful portrait of great wealth that Diaz shows his brilliance

The tone switches easily between the comic — Bevel’s shameless boasts are a treat — and the tragic (Mildred’s demise is bracing). And period New York is subtly imagined, with Ida’s apartment in Brooklyn the shambolic but more affable flipside to Bevel’s clinical mansion on the Upper East Side. Vanner notes, in his Edith Wharton-like prose, that the city swells “with the loud optimism of those who believe they have outpaced the future”.

But it is in his ugly-beautiful portrait of great wealth that Diaz shows his brilliance. Despite herself, Ida enjoys the “cool rush of luxury” while Bevel rails against the “speculating mobs and government regulators”. And, at a time of economic catastrophe, those with inherited assets insist they have self-made safety nets.

The question of just who owns a story has been the subject of several recent novels: A Lonely Man by Chris Power and The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz created suspense out of biographical theft. Similarly, Diaz uses the techniques of the detective novel to explore the perils of appropriation: there are as many foggy memories and vested interests here as there are witnesses. As she sifts through the flaky narratives provided by Vanner and Bevel, Ida appears like a Chandleresque gumshoe as much as a fledgling writer.

In this literary Rubik’s Cube, Diaz provides a viable, and hugely entertaining, argument that once a pen is put to paper an element of veracity is always lost. And when money is thrown into the mix, then the lies really multiply.

Trust by Hernan Diaz, Picador £16.99/Riverhead $28, 416 pages

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Summer Books 2022

In the last week of June, FT writers and critics shared their favourites. Some highlights were:

Economics by Martin Wolf
Environment by Pilita Clark
Fiction by Laura Battle
History by Tony Barber
Politics by Gideon Rachman
Critics’ choice