Have I Got a Story for You

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I had other plans for today, but then, on Wednesday morning, having finished a book the night before, I perused my shelves for something to take with me. Something to read on my way to work. After much consideration and few false starts, I chose Trust by Hernan Diaz.

I knew nothing about it, aside from that it was extremely well received. My copy even has the little “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” badge on it. I’d considered buying it many times before in various bookstores—all the way back to when everyone and their mother (including my mother) was reading it in hardcover. All the way back as in two years ago, but overwhelming speed with which ‘publishing’ moves these days is a topic for another time.

When a copy popped up in Housing Works a couple months ago, I decided to give in and buy the book that everyone said was so good. Then the requisite waiting period began. Then my friend Brad was reading it, and I saw it on his coffee table last week. Then I needed a new book, and there it was, and there I was.

These details aside—only relevant or remotely interesting to you if you’re curious how I go about acquiring and picking out the books I read—by 10:54pm on that same Wednesday (two days ago), I had finished it. It only feels fitting, therefore, that I write about it with haste, and tell you about it without delay. So here we are.

And here is the part where I talk about how difficult it will be to summarize, synthesize, review in any coherent sense, this book. It’s a hallmark of my reviews that I start with this little preamble, but in this case, I mean it in a slightly different way than usual. It’s not that the themes are so lofty, or the breadth so expansive. It’s just that I don’t want to spoil any single little thing.

I read it, as I mentioned, without the slightest conception of what it was about. I’d like for you to be able to do the same. An impossibility if you continue reading this, which I’d also like for you to do. Hmmm. There might end up being some ~light~ spoilers insofar as they’re necessary to explain the structure of the story. There will be. Take heed.

Trust is made up of four parts—a fabricated novel, a ghostwritten memoir, an actual memoir and a decoded diary, in that order. The fabricated novel introduces us to Benjamin and Helen Rask—fabulously rich because of his investing prowess and his ability to take advantage of a completely unregulated market. He is incredibly smart—hermetic, only interested in the numbers and how he can use them to his advantage to earn ever more money. She is incredibly smart—interested in culture, music, literature, the arts, and a dedicated philanthropist in the aforementioned category among others. As a stand alone, it’s worth mentioning that this was my favorite section of the book. I was sad when it was over until I wasn’t anymore.

In the second section, we come to understand that Benjamin and Helen are the fictionalized version of a ‘real’ couple—or real within the world of the book at least. Whether that ‘real’ couple is a fictionalized version of an actually real couple, I couldn’t say. This interplay between truth and fiction, gossip and reality, certainty and doubt is, in large part, what makes the novel as a whole so intoxicating. Each time you think you’re getting closer to the truth, you’re subtly reminded that the truth is always, at least in some part, made up by the person who’s telling it.

The real couple that inspired the Rasks is the Bevels—Andrew and Mildred. The creator of these Rasks is one Harold Vanner, a writer who at the very least knew the originals and at the very most knew the originals quite well. That’s one point I cannot spoil because you never do find out the extent of the relationship. Were some of the similarities between the Bevels and their doubles dumb luck? Some of the differences a result of intentional withholding? For me, this was one of the most interesting mysteries among many mysteries. One thing is for sure, and it’s that Andrew Bevel is incensed by the portrayal, and the parallels that have been drawn between fiction and reality by the nosy, gossip-hungry reading public.

I was fascinated by this—the fictionalized version of him, though clearly meant to be a bit of a villain, is so much more likable than the subsequently presented version of him. The fictional Benjamin Rask comes across as a gifted and isolated savant who struggles with processing the emotions—the affections—that spring up when he finds a woman who is his equal. His actions, financially are the result of his hardwired brain and his actions in regard to his wife are tragic manifestations of a love that he does not know how to handle or process.

In the third part of the novel, one suspects that, lacking the complexities of character and hidden emotional depth that make Rask interesting, Bevel might be a sociopath. But that’s not really the point, because it’s not really about him. It’s about Helen, it’s about Mildred, it’s about Ida Partenza, the woman that Bevel hires to help him write his autobiography, his rebuttal to Vanner’s version of him and his wife. In hiring her, he creates a person who can uncover, who wants to uncover, the truth.

Though here again, we remain mired in ambiguity. As Ida writes the story of the Bevels, and tries to simultaneously discover who Mildred really was, she must acknowledge, and does acknowledge, a growing sense of ownership over both stories—the version she creates for Bevel and the version she tries to uncover that might shed some light on the true Mildred. It’s all filtered through her brain, it’s all marked with the indelible smudges of her.

The person she thinks Bevel is, the person she wants Mildred to be, all of it. Ida is the daughter of an Italian immigrant, Ida lives in Brooklyn, Ida’s father calls himself an exile, not an immigrant, is an artist in his own right, is an anarchist, Ida’s mother is dead. Ida is the woman of the house, Ida wants freedom, Ida has a quasi-boyfriend, but Ida doesn’t love him, Ida is a person, with preconceptions, opinions, desires, etc. She is not an empty vessel through which information (whatever source it may come from) can pass and emerge untinged. And Ida is the one through which all, and I mean all of the information we receive as a reader, does pass.

Even in the fourth part, which is the decoded personal diary of Mildred Bevel—or at least an excerpt of one of them—the decoder is none other than our Ida. Of the fourth part, I will say nothing more, since I think I’ve already said enough.

While this novel as a whole is about money, it is actually about Ida—the WRITER. The one who tells the tale. The words on the page might scream money, money, money, the spaces between the lines whisper stories, stories, stories.

At one point Bevel claims that money is above everything—money is everything, it’s the single thread that pokes itself through every element of life. Under this supposition, he would then be the most powerful man in the world, rich beyond conception. However, in the end, it is Ida Partenza who tells his story! Tells Mildred’s story, tells her story. It is Ida Partenza from Brooklyn who has a way with words and who decides that it’s her story to tell.

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The next episode of le podcast, Something We Read, comes out on Tuesday! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, tell a friend, tell a lover, tell your high school English teacher, etc., etc.

Love u, bye!

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