Review: 'Trust'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Trust
By Hernan Diaz
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books

On its face, the story of a Roaring '20s stock market titan and his fragile wife is not compelling to those of us who prize honor and integrity over money. But Hernan Diaz's Trust is far more than that.

The novel, which was included in President Obama's list of favorite novels of 2022, begins with the tale of Benjamin Rask. He's the only child of a rich family, more content with numbers than people. When he inherits the family fortunes and businesses, he's content to let things ride because he doesn't care about them. Then he discovers joy in playing the stock market, and increases his wealth many times over. Gradually, he's drug into making a few society appearances and ends up marrying a quiet girl. Helen was drug all over Europe by her society-loving mother and arcane knowledge-loving father, performing memory parlor tricks.

The two loners find a way to not only co-exist, but to co-exist happily.

Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it.

That this also allows them both to continue to be loners is a contradiction, yet feels plausible.

Turns out this first section of Trust is “Bonds”, a novel written by Harold Vanner. It is dispassionate, no matter what events occur, and removed from the Rasks' inner selves. It is a curious work that recalls Edith Wharton and Thomas Mann without their ability to get to the heart of a matter.

It also, within the universe of this novel, apparently was a work comissioned by an actual 1920s stock market titan who did not approve of the result. The second section of Trust can sneak up on a reader with its first-person account of man with a history somewhat similar to Rask, one Andrew Bevel. There are similarities but also great differences, mainly in the controlled, yet ever-present, conviction of Bevels that he and his wife are the most wonderful and giving of people. It's not his fault the stock market crashed, even though he sold vast amounts of stock short just before it imploded. And that his wife was never known or understood as a paragon of virtue who loved music, books and flowers.

A third, and fourth, section add to the kaleidoscope effect of the whole novel. Who is in charge of his own story? Or her own story? Who gets to do the telling? And who is telling the truth, not just as they may have seen it, but as close to the truth as it's possible for a person to reach?

Diaz uses this structure to ask these questions regarding several ideas, from Wall Street and finance, to partnerships between men and women, from a writer and an interview subject, to family legacies of many kinds, including physical, spiritual and emotional.

The scope is spectacular. The ways the four parts of the novel intersect and inform each other are elegant. It is especially fitting that at one point, a character's love of math and music combine not only to perform well in the stock market, but as a way to advise someone else how to do the same.

They had to become his thoughts first. Call and response: I gave him D F♯ E A so he could think he’d come up with A E F♯ D on his own.

While making another character believe her ideas were his worked for this character, the gambit is shown in a different light by another character:

Later, over the years, both at work and in my personal life, I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs—as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place. (It is possible that in some cases their vanity had eclipsed their memory so that, thanks to this selective amnesia, they could lay claim to their epiphany with a clean conscience.)

Another character expresses why mystery novels, especially those written by women in the genre's Golden Age, spoke to so many:

I was comforted by the idea of order in their novels. It all started with crime and chaos. Even sense and meaning themselves were challenged—the characters, their actions and their motives seemed incomprehensible. But after a brief reign of lawlessness and confusion, order and harmony were always restored. Everything became clear, everything was explained and everything was well with the world. This gave me enormous peace. And, perhaps more importantly, these women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world. Their stories were not just about romance and domestic bliss. There was violence in their books—a violence they controlled. These writers showed me, through their example, that I could write something dangerous. They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: the reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted. They were the writers who first made me want to become a writer.

The need for order is one that is imposed by different characters in different ways, from the Wall Street financier to his wife to a poor typist who is the daughter of an anarchist. Two of the four sections of the novel have the titles of "Bonds" and "Futures". In both instances, they speak to the financial aspect of the story, and to the personal. That's the kind of novel Trust is. And like a well-crafted symphony, the various movements work together to form a whole greater than the sum of their individual parts.