Trust by Hernan Diaz
Review by Helen King
Hulking at the centre of Trust is the lavish Manhattan mansion belonging to Wall Street tycoon Andrew Bevel and his wife, Mildred, the enigmatic power couple scrutinised in Hernan Diaz’s tricksy and elegant new offering. A vast ‘temple dedicated to wealth’ (and marital home) built by Andrew during the economic boom of the 1920s, by the early 1980s ‘Bevel House’ — its owners decades dead — has, in accordance with the stipulation of their estate, been renovated and reopened as a museum. Vaunted in the press of the time in glinting language which reflects the nature of its value — ‘the city’s latest “gem”, a ‘historical “treasure”, a cultural “jewel”’ — it is essentially a museum of itself; or, more precisely, a kitschy, postmodern reversion thereof, repackaging its story in line with the desires and expectations of a contemporary audience. In Reagan’s USA, this means Bevel House’s ‘original beaux arts atmosphere’ is disrupted by exhibition signage rendered entirely in sans serif (‘surely meant to be irreverent in its anachronistic austerity’), piped-in Prohibition-era music, and a gift shop hawking an array of ‘Roaring Twenties tchotchkes’ (‘feather boas, hip flasks, [...] flapper costumes’) alongside ‘a gondola devoted to Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Copies of all his books. Biographies and critical studies.’
Lost in this rendition is any semblance of the Bevels themselves, who it seems lived in a cloistered, strangely joyless relationship with their fortune and with each other, self-segregated to a degree from their cultural moment; one truth among many that are of no consequence for the purposes of their posthumous museum.
Absent from the gift-shop gondolas are copies of best-selling novel Bonds, an Edith Wharton-inflected roman-à-clef based on the life (and death, in Mildred’s case) of the Bevels, written by one Harold Vanner during the 1930s. As Trust unravels we learn that Andrew Bevel spent his last years ensuring that Vanner’s offending narrative — which dismantled the received notion of the ‘heroic rise’ of the formidable financier, foregrounding instead the generational wealth which scaffolded his ascent — was expunged from the record: Bonds is swiftly taken out of circulation, its author’s publishing deals ditched, his name excised from library catalogues. ‘I must make use of all my resources to bend and align reality,’ Bevel intones at one point, a flicker of self-awareness afforded by Diaz to his obliquely malignant protagonist which flags Trust’s core preoccupations: the insidious nature of the power bestowed by extreme wealth, the tendency of that power to tilt at a warping or distortion of truth, the uneasy rhyme detectable in the twin operations of finance and fiction.
Structured by the multiperspectivity for which Rashomon has become a byword, Trust poses as four separate manuscripts, each subverting the other in turn as they offer alternative versions of the same mesh of events. The full text of Vanner’s Bonds is the first, a reassuringly linear rendition of the lives of the Bevels, with sharply drawn characters ascribed satisfying narrative arcs. There’s an enjoyable disconnect when Vanner’s screed is immediately succeeded by quaintly-titled My Life, Andrew Bevel’s unfinished autobiography, a ponderous, self-aggrandising, and — it becomes clear — revisionist endeavour, in which Bevel is at pains to gild his own myth, while occluding the uncomfortable ones floated by others. ‘What matters is the tally of our accomplishments, not the tales about us’, Bevel opines in the preface to his truncated memoir, which as the chapters proceed reveals itself as an extended exercise in self-deception (that ‘what matters?’ should be the ultimate question asked by this disingenuous text in Diaz’s deft juxtapositioning of it, is one of the many sharp ironies that sear through Trust as a whole).
The central tale Bevel tells about himself in My Life is of his near-preternatural gift for financial ‘intuition’, which allowed him to play the stock market like a clairvoyant, making a windfall while the rest of Wall Street crashed and burned in 1929. It’s a fiction which will be incrementally destabilised over the course of the following two manuscripts: A Memoir, Remembered, by Andrew Bevel’s erstwhile ghostwriter Ida Partenza, whose book revisits her time working on My Life with the mogul before his sudden death curtailed the project, and Futures, Mildred Bevel’s fragmentary final journal, discovered by Partenza decades later among the dusty archives at Bevel House. It is in the two women’s interlocking narratives that things really get interesting, as layers of the stories already told are peeled away page by page, exposing a grim underskin riven by misrepresentations, vanities, and lies. ‘Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget,’ warns Ida’s anarchist father, alarmed at his daughter’s professional entanglement with the capitalist baron; in amidst the stark, morphine-doused reflections which fill Mildred’s diary are inculpatory revelations surrounding the true provenance of the Bevels’ windfall during the 1929 crash, which bend and fracture the realities presented thus far.
In Futures the clatter of the domed stock market ticker — which stood like an altar in Bevel House, and sounds throughout Trust like an irregular, mechanical heartbeat — subsides, giving way to the quietness of a hospital bedroom and the end stages of terminal illness. Mildred’s cancer having released her into ‘the terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory’, her scribbled diary (‘the fossil of an extinct species of one’) is characterised by a narcotic, hallucinatory quality which nonetheless has to it a hard lucidity. As she lays bare the uncomfortable truths of her marriage (‘he understood he’d never be able to uphold the myth forming around him with my help’), other, more profound truths seep onto the page, lending a final wash of clarity to Trust as a whole. ‘People look at me differently now. As if I weren’t one of them,’ she notes, finding in the alienation of illness an echo of an earlier estrangement — insignificant now — that was the corollary of extreme personal wealth. At the end, she registers ‘words peeling off from things’, exposing and wondering — just as Trust itself does, at the core fiction of language, the way — much like money — it perpetually stands in for something other than itself, ‘an illusion we’ve all agreed to support’.