I decided to read Trust because it recently split the Pulitzer Price for Fiction with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. I had already read (and reviewed) Kingsolver’s novel, and wanted to be able to say I had read both winners. A word of warning: I couldn’t figure out how to talk about this novel without a few mild spoilers.
Trust is divided into four sections. The first relates the story of Wall Street financier Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen. Benjamin, the scion of a wealthy tobacco family, eschews the family business and goes into stock market speculation, making a killing with his incredible ability to time the market just right. Not only does his make a killing during the Roaring Twenties, he starts selling short months before the crash, making him one of the few to profit off the Great Depression. His wife, Helen, is a cultured woman with a fondness for music and a gift for languages. She becomes known for her philanthropy and patronage of the arts. Neither of the Rasks cares much for public life, and they remain a mystery both to their social class and to New York as a whole.
Or they, would, if the Rasks were real. The first section is actually a novel within a novel, called “Bonds.” The second section of Trust is presented as the unfinished autobiography of a man named Adam Bevel, a titan of finance much like Benjamin Rask, also with a wife who devotes her time and money to philanthropy and the arts. Bevel is clearly writing in response to Bonds, to which he has taken great offense, particularly on behalf of his late wife, Mildred. Bevel is seeking to correct the record both about the circumstances of her death and of his success on Wall Street. Bevel insists that all of his transactions were meant to not only increase his private fortune but to serve the public good. In his telling, his short selling in 1929 was meant to be a warning to foolish investors to get out of the market.
In addition to his self-serving version of events, Bevel’s writing is marked by a haughtiness of prose and a hilarious dearth of specific detail, especially regarding his wife. At several points, the book includes such language as “include some examples here” and the like. This is explained in Trust’s third section, in which a young Italian-American woman, daughter of an anarchist printer, takes a job as Bevel’s private secretary only to learn that she is actually expected to transcribe his autobiography and “fix the language” to make it suitable for publication. As Ida Partenza reflects on the experience decades later, she has mixed feelings about her work for Bevel and her part in it. Mostly, Ida regrets the way she went along with Bevel’s diminishment of his wife’s intellect and forcefulness. Bevel wants to present her in his book as a meek, gentle creature with a “childlike” simplicity. Her passion for the arts becomes, in Bevel’s version, little more than a hobby.
When the Bevels’ personal papers finally become available to scholars, Ida digs into Mildred Bevel’s writings hoping to at long last meet the real woman behind her husband’s simplified image. These writings, dashed off in a journal kept during a hospitalization in a Swiss sanatorium, comprise the fourth and final section of Trust. Though they are not in narrative form, they give the reader a sense of the “real” Mildred as she lets slip some secrets about her marriage and her husband’s career.
The unusual structure of Trust allows Hernan Diaz to play around with the ideas of truth and reality in fiction. It catches the reader out to learn that Benjamin and Helen Rask are not “real” and that Adam and Mildred Bevel are, but then of course neither of them are real either. Similarly, each successive section of Trust after the first purports to tell the true story, but of course none of them are true, both because the whole work is a fiction and, even within that world, no one character can lay claim to the truth. The reader may get sucked into the idea that Mildred’s diary provides the real story at last, but even in context, it is just her version of events, and likely to be at least a little self-serving or clouded by perspective. Is the reader supposed to accept Mildred’s version of events just because she gets the last, unchallenged word?
Reading Trust is an interesting experience. I was enjoying the first section, Bonds, on its own merits. Diaz mimics the style of the time and of writers like Edith Wharton, who covered similar territory. It’s an impressive pastiche of the society fiction of its era. My initial disappointment at the change of tone in the second section was immediately undercut by the subtle humor of Bevel’s self-delusions and inability to face the truth. Again, I was initially resistant to the third section, but eventually Ida’s story charmed me as well, as she struggled to balance life at home with her workingman father and her job with his complete opposite. And Mildred’s diary entries pack an emotional punch, casting all of the other narratives in a different light.
I mentioned up top that Trust was recently named a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It’s not hard to see why. What Hernan Diaz has accomplished here is certainly award-worthy, and I’m glad the Pulitzer committee agreed.
