Trust begins not with Chapter One, but in the Table of Contents, which lists four chapters by four different authors. “What’s going on?” you wonder. “I thought the author was Hernan Diaz.” Trust me: Diaz knows what he’s doing in this poignant novel about a Wall Street tycoon and his role in the 1929 stock market crash.
The first chapter introduces Benjamin Rask, a painfully introverted businessman with a talent for manipulating his inherited fortune into an empire. Meanwhile his wife Helen descends into madness, forcing Rask to place her in a psychiatric institution.
But wait! The second chapter is an angry refutation of the first chapter by another businessman, Andrew Bevel, who believes it’s a thinly veiled attack on himself and his own wife. Bevel is determined to set the record straight, but his chapter is messy, an unfinished autobiography peppered with hasty notations.
This contradiction leads to the third chapter in which Ida Partenza, an impoverished young woman, recounts her involvement in Bevel’s life, as well as her relationship with her anarchist father during the Great Depression. Who is telling the truth? Is anyone? The author of the final chapter reveals that.
Throughout the book are well-developed arguments for and against capitalism, interspersed with down-to-earth stories about the principal characters. Bevel, like Rask, has a Midas touch that increases his wealth while America goes down the drain during the financial disaster of October 1929. Bevel sees himself as the savior of American economics and his wife Mildred as a saintly philanthropist. Conversely, Ida’s father paints all rich people with the same brush, to the point of ostracizing his daughter when she dares to disagree with him.
There is much more to this novel than I can do justice to in a review. Diaz uses multiple viewpoints and skillful narration to pen a story of wealth, loneliness, and self-deception reminiscent of Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane. Refreshingly, he does it all without sex, profanity, or offensive language. I recommend Trust to anyone who loves great literature.
Featured by Chevron Ross
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Weapons of Remorse The Seven-Day Resurrection The Samaritan’s Patient
