The US’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, sweeping many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar consumer society, while others experienced extreme poverty. The epic boom ended in a cataclysmic bust. On Black Monday, October 28 1929, the Dow declined nearly 13%. On the next day, Black Tuesday, the market dropped nearly 12%. By mid-November, the Dow had lost almost half of its value. The devastating Wall Street crash signalled the beginning of the Great Depression.
Hernan Diaz’s dazzling new novel Trust aims to reveal what happened to an upper-class Manhattan couple during the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression, when a Wall Street tycoon enhanced his wealth as his contemporaries lost theirs. The title refers not only to financial trusts but also the trust we place in each other, the contract between reader and author.
Paying homage to Edith Wharton, Henry James and F Scott Fitzgerald, Diaz moves seamlessly through the very echelons of a society he ruthlessly dissects as he delves into all the tensions that accumulate around the amplifying of already vast fortunes.
Diaz’s first novel, In The Distance, a bizarre western about a Swedish boy who walks across 19th-century America, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award. Trust underscores his prodigious gift as an author. Nowhere is monetary ignorance more apparent than in evaluations of the economic and monetary events of the 1920s and 1930s. Though several decades have passed, various popular accounts continue to misinterpret the causes of the disequilibrium that occurred. Diaz echoes these many (mis) interpretations in a book that retells the same story over and over again.
There’s no trusting this novel. It is constructed as four books in one: a novel-within-a-novel, a partial manuscript, a memoir and a diary. The opening section, entitled “Bonds” and written by one Harold Vanner, is a 1937 best-seller about the rise of a Wall Street tycoon named Benjamin Rask. He brings to mind powerful moguls such as JP Morgan, who was accused of manipulating the nation’s financial system for his own gain, and other robber barons of the time who had the power to regulate the supply and price of products and commodities.
Rask, a wealthy man without appetites, is fascinated by only one thing: “If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing … There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transactions affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion.”
Rask eventually marries, only for the sake of posterity — Helen is equally self-contained and avoids society while becoming a patron of the arts. Rask continues to accumulate enormous wealth. Then, comes the Crash. Rumours circulate that he manipulated the market and the Rasks are shunned by society. Helen ends up as a patient at a psychiatric institute in Switzerland.
We then discover that Vanner took as the inspiration for his novel the “true story” of enigmatic financier Andrew Bevel and his marriage to Mildred, a quiet, secluded spouse with hidden talents. Furious at what he views as a false and misleading tale, Bevel churns out his own incomplete memoir and then turns to his secretary, Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, to give life to it on the page and set the record straight.
Once again, we suspend our disbelief in this enthralling section of his novel, which mostly takes place during the Great Depression. The memoir becomes a catalyst for Ida’s own eventual career as a writer. She is secretly conflicted about the origin of her own success and takes her back, decades later, to the long-dead Bevels.
In an interview, Diaz spoke about researching the book, noting that all the narratives about wealth are about men. It’s in this section that Diaz takes the opportunity to present the story from a female perspective, highlighting the contrast between the various versions. “What role did women have in that world?” Diaz asks. “They did not exist except as wives and secretaries — it was enraging and intriguing in equal measure.”
At once an immersive story about money and instruments of wealth as well as a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust recruits the reader as a detective on a quest for the truth. At the same time, as we sort through history and fiction, through a range of different accounts of the same story, we are made to confront the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
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