And, as with any good detective novel, the reader must parse contradictory accounts, dodge red herrings, and hunt for clues to find the answers. Like any good experimental novel, Trust-a clean, linear narrative until this point-shatters to fragments. And the plot-a political fable about a capitalist’s hubris-builds steadily to a dramatic conclusion. Finely sketched details accrete into compelling portraits. Matching the era’s writing, Vanner’s immersive novel evokes Edith Wharton’s perceptive eye and the muckrakers’ moral intensity. But Bonds, the opening political novel-within-a-novel by the fictitious Harold Vanner, succeeds on its own terms before Diaz puts it to other uses. All too often the embedded stories aren’t as good as their frames require them to be. I confess that the novel-within-a-novel conceit is a pet peeve of mine. The story unfolds in the interplay between these texts as much as within them. Trust consists of four sections: a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a private diary, each with its own author, audience, and agenda. Stories about the Rasks proliferate, each of which Diaz captures through a kaleidoscopic structure. An enraged public views Benjamin as “the hand behind the invisible hand.” The press depicts him as “a vampire, a vulture, or a pig.” Helen, insulated until now by her philanthropy, sees that “she would pay for the suffering that had helped make her husband rich beyond measure.” As the Rasks amass greater wealth, their private lives fall apart. Their fortune grows in spite of-or perhaps because of-the 1929 stock market crash. Benjamin has new money, Helen an old name. Trust revolves around a secretive wealthy couple, the Rasks. Who holds wealth, and why? And how does capital-like a “living creature following appetites of its own trying to exercise its free will”-shape the stories we tell?
But Diaz avoids allegory in favor of enduring questions. Diaz trains his eye on the wealthy New Yorkers of the Great Depression to tell a story of our time: capital’s inexorable march in the face of economic crisis. Hernan Diaz’s Trust, like his Pulitzer-finalist debut In the Distance (2017), is historical fiction that thrums with the energy of today’s crises.
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