The “Great Man” biography is an element of the American literary landscape that has been around for decades: bookshelves are filled with accounts of captains of industry accumulating massive fortunes and using them to exert an outsized influence on culture and politics. Many of these biographies contain similar accounts of men who ‘pulled themselves up by the bootstraps’, whose total dedication to their work and sheer genius helped them triumph over the competition through the force of sheer will. In his recent novel, Trust, Hernan Diaz has held all of these narratives up to the light, exposing just how many unseen layers there are to these myths that form the backbone of American capitalism.
Trust is comprised of four separate accounts, the first of which is a novel-within-a-novel, cleverly titled “Bonds”. Bonds is a bestselling 1937 novel about Wall Street tycoon Benjamin Rask, an aloof businessman whose only great love is finance. He ascends to the top of the finance world after a series of lucrative investments, with the steady support of his intelligent and humble wife Helen. As Rask accumulates more and more wealth, and cements his legacy as the foremost financial mind in the world by predicting the stock market crash of 1929, his wife Helen is being treated in a psychiatric institute in Switzerland. In the closing chapters of Bonds, the mysterious Rask is on top of the world in his professional life, as his personal life is thrown into chaos by his wife’s illness and his inability to heal her. Bonds reads like a Gatsby-esque narrative about life in the upper-echelons of New York society—a peek into the lives of the ultra-wealthy. Readers will find themselves fully swept up in the brilliantly rendered and fantastically woven world of Bonds, before Diaz begins challenging all of our assumptions and muddying the waters of the fictional and actual world in the subsequent sections.
The second section of Trust is the unfinished memoir of the business tycoon that Bonds is modeled on, a memoir that aims to correct the more scandalous and less-than-flattering elements of the preceding section. The memoir contains the sort of meaningless anecdotes concerning manifest destiny and triumph of the human will that are endemic to all of the impersonal and self-congratulatory memoirs penned by ultra-wealthy men. The memoir is a series of unfinished chapters and vague notes such as, “MATH in great detail. Precocious talent. Anecdotes.” It’s clearly a first draft meant to be revisited later and injected with the details necessary to fill out the narrative. The third section of the novel, told by Ida Partenza, a young woman whose socialist revolutionary father disapproves of her work with the most famous financier in New York, will once again totally recast the events of the first two sections, and expose some crucial layers of how the novel fits together. I’ll leave readers to discover the fourth section on their own, as its impossible to sketch just how magnificent of a denouement it is.
Central to Trust is the intersection between art and money, and the places where fact and fiction meet. In an interview on The New York Times Book Review podcast, Diaz explains, “Although wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative about itself as a nation, and occupy this almost transcendental place in our culture, I was rather surprised to see that there are precious few novels that deal with money itself. Sure, there are many novels that deal with class — we were talking about Henry James and Edith Wharton a moment ago — or with exploitation or with excess and luxury and privilege. Many examples of that, but very few examples of novels dealing with money and the process of the accumulation of a great fortune.” The novel deconstructs many of the temples we’ve built around the ultra-wealthy, examining our fascination with the trappings of wealth and our disinterest in digging deeper.
The title, Trust, is a brilliant encapsulation of Diaz’s efforts to unpack our relationship with truth and fiction, and the ways in which narratives can be spun to fit all sorts of motives and desires. The novel is a slowly unravelling thread that manages to pull its punches until the last pages, while still brimming with fascinating observations and themes throughout. Trust is the Great American Novel for the modern age, that challenges its reader to look closer at some of the beliefs they’ve held without question throughout their lives. Trust is propulsive but exquisitely detailed, a novel that I looked forward to revisiting almost immediately after I closed it. Diaz has provided us with a formally and stylistically singular piece of fiction that answers many important questions, but asks even more.