Trust. Perhaps the most important human emotion, because no relationship, no sense of context or direction, is possible without it. In Hernan Diaz’s novel, winner of the 2022 Booker prize, trust is also the way in which the wealthy harvest and protect their wealth. A practice perfected at the turn of the 20th century by early wealth practitioners. Thus, this novel is perfectly named, having to do with the practice of establishing financial trusts, with all the machinations of using money to make money. Also, the trust between men and women, parents and children, friends and loved ones, and associates. Powerful stuff indeed.
“We had our meal and, for the first and last time, a second glass of champagne. He denounced, as he often did, those who claimed his best days were behind him and his approach to business had become obsolete, despite all his recent triumphs. Then he revisited several moments of his life that we had already covered, always emphasizing how his personal interests converged with the nation’s well-being.”
The novel begins with a short novel, followed by a memoir, rather the notes for a memoir, before we are introduced to Ida, daughter of a struggling Italian immigrant, an anarchist, nearly impoverished, who takes a job taking dictation and enhancing a financial baron’s memoir of his supposedly spectacular instinct and business acumen, in response to a novel which, he claims, uses and abuses his life, and the life of his wife, and which must be corrected.
Trust is broken into four parts which, accumulated, reveal the story. The first, aptly named Bonds, is the biographical novel, which suggests not only the brilliance, and possible dishonesty, of the mogul, but details thr demise of his brilliant, eccentric, ostensibly mentally I’ll wife. From their home in Switzerland to their NYC mansion Diaz paints a portrait of the times among the American hyper-affluent in the 20s.
“It was not uncommon for Americans abroad to avoid one another. Not only because, according to an unspoken protocol, it was the tactful thing to do, but also because no one wanted to be perceived as friendless in Europe and provincially dependent on acquaintances from back home.
Warning: You will wade through great detail on finance and also on sanitarium practices, both important and, in this writer’s hand, largely accessible.
The second part, called My Life, the story as ultimately told by fictional financier Andrew Bevel to Ida, also contains his supposed notes for the story. Here, we detect his memoir cannot be trusted. An unreliable narrator of his life, and accomplishments, as well as his intentions, and that of his wife’s. The third section is Ida’s memory as an older woman, what she learned from the experience and from an extensive subsequent search for the truth.
In the backdrop, Ida’s father and associates provide essential contrast to the increasing divide being established between rich and poor, labor and management, men and women. Important reflections on the downside of capitalism, resonating past to present.
“I think of my father. He would always say that every dollar bill had been printed on paper ripped off a slave’s bill of sale. I can still hear him today. “Where does all this wealth here come from? Primitive accumulation. The original theft of land, means of production and human lives. All throughout history, the origin of capital has been slavery. Look at this country and the modern world. Without slaves, no cotton; without cotton, no industry; without industry, no finance capital. The original, unnamable sin.”
The last, surprising and troubling section, called Futures, which, you may recall, helped bring down the stock market more than once, is excerpted from Andrew’s wife Mildred’s journal, who holds the secret to what, and who, can be trusted, or not.
“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.) And even back then, in my youth, I was acquainted with this parasitic form of gaslighting. But someone presenting one of my family stories as theirs?”
A riveting insightful fantastically inventive work of fiction that deserves all the accolades it has received. This is Diaz’ second novel. His first, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is, in a word, wow.
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