Trust
By Hernan Diaz
Riverhead, 2022

I read the historical novel Trust when it was first published months ago, and I wasn’t taken with it. But when it recently split the Pulitzer Prize with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, I thought Diaz’s novel deserved another read. Here are my late—but considered—findings.

Diaz’s protagonist is the Midas-rich Andrew Bevel, a New York financier and creator of trusts who made his biggest killing by anticipating and “shorting” the financial collapse of 1929. Given his greedy character and research methods that foreshadow today’s quants, and despite his self-serving faith that he was performing a service with his manipulation of markets, Bevel could have been trusted to take advantage of the system—if he had not been such a secret operator. I suppose one appeal of Trust for the Pulitzer Committee was “revealing” a financier’s guilt--and implying some journalistic relevance to our own time.

But Trust is a very untrustworthy expose. Its architecture has, like Bevel’s huge Fifth Avenue mansion, inner sanctums and secret rooms. The first 126 pages purport to be a novel entitled Bonds by one Harold Vanner, a contemporaneous roman a clef that tells, if it can be trusted, the family background of Bevel (renamed Rask), his distant relationship with his wife Helen, and her horrible death in a Swiss sanitarium not long after Rask’s triumph.

The next 65 pages are an unpublished memoir by Bevel (My Life) in which he, in the first person, attempts to correct Vanner’s fiction after it became a best-seller. But the memoir is incomplete, superficial in its presentation of Helen (actually Mildred), interrupted by lacunae to be filled in later, and dribbles off into random notes at the end. Perhaps readers will trust these pages because they seem documentary--fragmentary in form and banal in the financier’s style.

Or perhaps readers will wisely withhold their trust. “Wisely” because the next 168 pages reveal that one Ida Partenza (in A Memoir, Remembered) has, as a 23-year-old employee of Bevel in 1938 ghostwritten My Life. Now 70 and the author of both non-fiction and fiction, Ida recalls working for Bevel in her own memoir--from a distance of almost 50 years. Her account is intercut with memories of other males--her father, an abusive Italian anarchist; her former boyfriend, a moocher and fake; and a nameless would-be blackmailer. Because Ida’s section is more sophisticated and contemporary in its literary style, readers may trust her more than they do Harold Vanner, who sounds like Henry James or maybe someone channeling the life of Scott Fitzgerald whose wife, Zelda, died in a sanitarium. But increasingly disgusted with both earlier male “narrators’” treatments of Mildred, Ida has motives for being unreliable, possibly fictionalizing in parts her own Memoir.

I’m sorry about the spoilers, but there’s no way to describe Trust without retelling its architecture. I will now note only that there’s a short fourth section— Futures by Mildred Bevel. It’s a manuscript that Ida accidentally (yes, accidentally) finds when she returns after many decades to the Bevel mansion, now a museum, to do research. If Ida hasn’t forged Mildred’s diary (to expose Bevel’s reductive portrait of his wife), then Futures could be a trustworthy death-bed alternative to all the pasts that have preceded it.

Bonds and Futures, as well as trust, are financial terms with which Diaz continually reminds readers of a fundamental quality of the money that is made by Bevel, distributed to charities by Mildred, made by Vanner from his book, and earned by Ida from her ghostwriting. Her Marxist-influenced father claims that money is “fictional,” an arbitrary invention that requires trust for it to be exchanged for substantial goods. The insight is interesting or obvious. Either way the idea doesn’t much affect the manipulation of people or stories about them in Diaz’s novel. Money may be fictional, but it has considerable power as Diaz will discover when he gets his $15,000 check from Pulitzer—unless he has to split with Kingsolver.

Pulitzer has a history of rewarding relatively traditional or journalistic novels, so I understand why Trust might be chosen. It’s structure may seem postmodern, but Diaz’s formal and stylistic gamesmanship is moderate and earnest as he delivers mostly politically correct “history,” politics, and a feminist recovery of an important (though fictional) woman. Or maybe women—both Mildred and Ida, the former a supporter of experimental music, the latter a successful writer. Essential to Diaz’s game is eliciting readers’ trust by imitating “real” discourses, establishing characters in their own “voices.” But the first two sections have no voices, no dialogue, and are therefore clunky and dull. Readers will need considerable patience to get to Ida’s sprightly, talkative section and to Mildred’s diary (if readers enjoy the elliptical diaries of moribund characters).

I admire the parts of Trust questioning the reliability of other parts. I just wish Diaz had been riskier, had more imaginatively and profoundly questioned how and why readers trust various kinds of narrative. He has Bevel say he made his millions because consumers of his financial products wanted easy profits and therefore trusted the purveyor. Bevel keeps telling Ida to revise his memoir so that it is easy to read, “as accessible to the `common reader’ as possible.” Diaz seems to have taken much of Bevel’s advice in constructing Trust.

Unlike classic postmodernists such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, or Barthelme, the second- or third-generation Diaz can ultimately be trusted to not require his intended audience to re-read, to try to resolve uncertainties. His loop is not a Mobius strip. And that is wise because the first half of Trust lacks the verbal vitality that would support a second reading. Here is a representative passage—on Mildred—from Bevel’s (and Ida’s) memoir:

She was too fragile, too good for this world and slipped away from it much too soon. Words are not enough to say how dearly I miss her. The greatest gift I have ever received was my time by her side. She saved me. There is no other way to put it. She saved me with her humanity and her warmth.

Trust wants to encourage epistemological suspicion, an admirable intention for a literary work, but I fear readers (other than the Pulitzer Committee) will easily see through Diaz’s game of reliability. Trust won’t collapse like the 1929 stock market, but once the game is up the novel loses much of its appeal.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight unreliable novels, the most recent of which is Passing Again where the author and protagonist take a road trip together.