‘Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth – all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of Bonds,  a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. 

Spanning a century, Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts four competing narratives into conversation with one another. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting 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.’

Upon reading Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance, which told the picaresque tale of Hakan, a nineteenth-century Swedish immigrant to the American West, who must reverse the typical expansionist journey into unknown territory to seek out his brother in New York, I knew that I would read everything the Argentinian author ever wrote. While TRUST is an entirely different novel in some ways, exchanging the Cormac McCarthyesque austerity of the frontier for the cold-blooded opulence of New York in the 1920s and 1930s, the elegant discipline of Diaz’s prose and his subtle critique of American mythologies holds true, coupled with intricate formal experimentalism and crystalline focus on the lacunae between competing narratives. Both in subject and in style, Diaz shows himself an heir of Edith Wharton in this novel; he holds the society of his narrative to the light, honing in on every flaw as though his New York were a nugget of fool’s gold, while somehow managing to execute individual character studies with beautiful precision and nuanced subtlety. The first section of TRUST comprises a novel within a novel that charts the marriage and rise to astronomical wealth of Benjamin and Helen Rask, encompassing their respective early lives, their embroilment in the stock market crash, and their surrender to tragedy. In some ways, the characters of Benjamin and Helen are deliberately archetypical, recognisable to any fan of Wharton or, indeed, Gossip Girl: an immensely powerful couple whose union intertwines plucky entrepreneurship with blue-blooded grandeur, and overlays clandestine, implicitly sordid wealth accrual with philanthropy and patronage of the arts. However, the peculiarity of the relationship between Benjamin and Helen is gorgeously and thoughtfully observed, endowing both partners with an irreducible, somewhat awkward humanity despite their symbolic typicality. Diaz is particularly masterful in drawing out the new loneliness of intimacy between two people who had previously enclosed themselves in solitude, and their yearning recognition of the unbridgeable gaps between them:

‘The speed at which Benjamin enlarged his fortune and the wisdom with which Helen distributed it were perceived as the public demonstration of the close bond between them. This, together with their elusiveness, turned them into mythical creatures in the New York society they so utterly disregarded, and their fabulous stature only increased with their indifference. Their family life, however, did not fully conform to the fable of a harmonious couple. Benjamin’s admiration of Helen bordered on awe. Finding her unfathomable and intimidating, he desired her with a form of mystical, mostly chaste lust. Doubt, a feeling that had never visited him before his wedding, increased year after year. If at work he was always self-assured and resolute, at home he became indecisive and timid. He wove intricate conjectures around her, threaded with contrived causal links that quickly expanded into vast nets of suppositions, which he would unpin and weave again in different patterns. Helen sensed his hesitation and tried to appease him. But as much as she tried (and she did try), she was unable to fully reciprocate Benjamin’s feelings. While she was impressed by his achievements and touched by his devotion, and although she was always kind, attentive, and even tender to him, there was a small but ineluctable force, much like the repulsion between two magnets, that made her recoil in proportion to his closeness. She was never cruel or dismissive toward him – quite the contrary, she was a considerate and even affectionate companion. Still, from the very beginning, he knew that something was missing. And knowing that he knew, she tried to make up for this in many thoughtful yet insufficient ways. Benjamin always experienced an incomplete thrill on these occasions.

Around this core of quiet discomfort, they managed to build a strong marriage. Perhaps part of that strength came precisely from the dissonant void and their willingness to make up for it. But it is also true that there existed a connection between them. They both knew that, despite their differences, they were uniquely well-suited for each other. Until meeting, neither of them had ever known anyone who would accept their idiosyncrasies without questions. Every interaction out in the world had always implied some form of compromise. Now, for the first time, they experienced the relief of not having to adapt to the demands and protocols inherent to most exchanges – or devote part of their attention to the awkwardness that prevailed whenever they refused to follow those conventions. Even more importantly, in their relationship they discovered the joy of mutual appreciation. ‘

Writing as he does with the benefit of historical hindsight, Diaz refrains from making straw men and women of his characters, and the sense he creates of New York in the 1920s as a bubble close to bursting builds dramatic irony that lends gravitas and poignancy to his narrative rather the sensationalised moralism. This fable of crash and boom has neither cartoonish tycoon villains nor the sparkling hedonism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tales of the Jazz Age, but rather an unsettling chill surrounding the laxity of financial regulations, and a focus on the myth of capitalism as a reality-altering web of lies and accepted ‘facts’. Diaz cooly delineates the ways in which American governance allows Benjamin Rask to short-sell and speculate with such amoral froideur; while his dealings are distasteful, there is nothing illicit in his profiting from the fall of others. Indeed, in his carefully-wrought depiction of the 1929 crash, Diaz’s understated association of Rask’s apparent prescience with the supernatural bolsters the grasping hollowness of the ever-present American appetite for a witch-hunt, the naive willingness to participate in a flawed system until its cruel indifference is felt personally:

‘Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail – we are ruined by forces beyond our control. During the last week of October 1929, it took most speculators – from the high-powered financier in downtown Manhattan to the amateur housewife trading at the San Francisco Stock Exchange – a matter of days to shift from the agents of their success, with nothing to thank but their own acumen and relentless will, to the victims of a profoundly flawed and maybe even corrupt system, which was the sole responsible for their demise. A dip in the indexes, an epidemic of fear, a selling frenzy driven by pessimism, a widespread inability to respond to margin calls…Whatever caused the slump that, in turn, became a panic, one thing was clear – none of those who had helped to inflate the bubble felt responsible for its bursting. They were the blameless casualties of a disaster of almost natural proportions. […] In the general desolation, amidst the rubble, Rask was the only man standing. And he stood taller than ever, since most of the other speculators’ losses had been his gain. He had always benefitted from chaos and turmoil, as his masterful operations during the ticker delays repeatedly had proven, but what happened over the last months of 1929 had no precedent. Once this picture became clear enough, the public was quick to react. It had been Rask who engineered the whole crash to begin with, people said. Slyly, he had whetted a reckless appetite for debts he knew all along could never be honoured. Subtly, he had been dumping his stocks and driving the market down. Artfully, he had leaked rumours and stoked paranoia. Mercilessly, he had overthrown Wall Street and kept it under his thumb with his selling spree the day right before Black Thursday. Everything – the breaks in the market, the uncertainty, the bearishness leading to panic selling – had been orchestrated by Rask. His was the hand behind the invisible hand.’ 

The despairing impulse with which the newly wounded search for a scapegoat is conveyed without judgement, albeit rendered all the more pathetic by Rask’s apparently level-headed impermeability. Nonetheless, this operational carapace is counterbalanced by Diaz’s depiction of Rask’s impulse to control, which bears echoes of contemporary tech giants like Elon Musk while sounding a poignant note that evokes the disastrous hubris of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. This narrative ache is most apparent in the relation of Helen’s illness, an apparent recurrence of paralysing childhood anxiety stemming from the couple’s social ostracisation. For anyone familiar with the zero at the bone brought on by anxious dread, the account of Helen’s suffering is piercing, studded with evidence of Diaz’s amazing eye for devastating detail:

‘Helen was standing in the middle of the room, facing the door. There was something regal in the Grecian simplicity of her nightgown, something martial in her tousled hair and scars, something angelic in her victorious stillness.’

If, in this description, there is something of the archetypal madwoman in the attic, the hauntingly martyred emblem of silenced or suffocated female rage and agency most famously encapsulated by Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha Mason, the effect is deliberate and symptomatic of Diaz’s genius. Helen’s gradual circling of the drain, as the first section of TRUST reaches its denouement, is self-reflexive and self-conscious, presaging the novel’s principal theme: the authority of narrative, whose stories matter, how they are told, and how competing accounts are to be navigated. Even Helen’s naming seems strategic as the novel unfolds in all its beautiful intricacy, throwing up mythical links with her Trojan namesake, whose face may have launched a thousand ships, but whose voice is never heard. 

It is nearly impossible to go into extensive detail about the three remaining sections of TRUST without spoiling the novel for future readers, which would be a pity indeed. Suffice to say, the gilded experience of the Rasks is later counterpointed by the introduction of Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian father with radical Leftist sympathies, whose existence on the precipice of poverty ironically pierces the facade of the American Dream while gathering poignant strains of diasporic dilemmas and disappointments: 

‘My father never called himself an immigrant. He was an exile. This was an all-important distinction for him. He had not chosen to leave; he had been chased out. He had not come to the United States to prosper; revolting against the very idea of prosperity had been what had pushed him to America in the first place. Visions of gold-paved streets never lit up his dreams, and he was deaf to the gospel of thrift and industry; he preached, rather, that all property is theft. There was nothing in common between him and his more mercantile-minded compatriots, and he made sure to stress this at all times. As a self-described exile, his views on both his homeland and his adoptive country were often contradictory – an amalgamation of resentment and longing, of gratitude and antipathy. He claimed to detest the nation that had killed and persecuted his comrades and cast him out. Yet the United States could offer nothing that came even close to the songs, dishes and traditions from Campania – and they were all part of our daily life through his humming, his cooking and his stories. He declared his disdain for the imbecilic people who had surrendered to Mussolini and his black-shirted thugs. Yet he treated Americans with the paternalist condescension often dispensed to slow learners and obedient pets. He resented his parents for not sticking with the vernacular of his ancestors and having submitted, voluntarily, to the “Tuscan babble” that represented the oppression of the central state. Yet even if in protest against “Italian” he had, not without difficulty, embraced English, he still found it an expressively deficient language, limited in its vocabulary and rustic in its constructions, never conceiving that these shortcomings were, in fact, his own. Invariably these personal contradictions were resolved with sweeping universal statements: “I have no country. I don’t want one. The root of all evil, the cause of every war – god and country.”’

Bound up in Mr. Partenza’s politics is a crude rendering of another of Diaz’s central ideas: the quietly radical understanding of finance as fiction. Partenza memorably rails against the ‘mirage’ of the New York skyline, demonising, with all the ‘sweeping universal statements’ of the ideologue, the mass deception of all fiction, whether literary or political. Readers, like Ida, are caught somewhere between frustration at Mr Partenza’s uncompromising certainty, ‘untroubled by the possibility of error’, and realisation of the muted and oppressive power of wealth. Through Ida’s eyes, Diaz creates wonderful descriptions of the physical establishments of the zenith of finance capitalism; the homes and offices of financiers, so layered in both showy and subtle displays of opulence, are spaces in which Ida feels herself an intruder, her social difference serving as unwelcome evidence of the predatory, competitive nature of capitalism: 

‘As we reached the entrance, I saw applicants going into the building, but never coming out of it. I assumed (and later confirmed) they were dismissed through a back door, probably to prevent us learning anything from those who were done. If we had, for the most part, remained quiet during our wait, the closer we got to the door, the more the silence tightened. We were on our own. And, although there was no sense of hostility in the air, against one another. The doorman, wearing a brass emblem of Bevel Investments as if it were a medal, counted to twelve by pointing at our heads with his index finger as we were let into the reception. We were told to wait by a desk. The walls of green marble vanished towards a remote ceiling. What was not made of stone was made of bronze. Nothing shone but everything emitted a pale glow. Sounds had a tactile quality, and we all did out best not to litter the space with any audible objects of our own.[…] We were let off on the fifteenth or seventeenth floor. Looking out at the gridded pattern of streets full of silent little cars, the river with its tugboats and, beyond it, the docks and Brooklyn’s modest skyline, I realised I had never been so high up. The city seemed so tidy and hushed from above. Later I would learn the building was seventy-two stories tall.’

The idea of silence surrounding power ties neatly and forcefully back to Wharton’s critique of the emotional stifling of New York’s elite, with an added emphasis on the ‘invisible hand’ puppeteering the rise and fall of capitalistic economies. Diaz hones in with a keen critical eye on the reality-altering artifice of capitalism, and the imperceptible, albeit constant, operation of its instruments to convince its subjects that there is no functional alternative. The inherent fiction of capitalism, as pronounced by Mr Partenza, is, however, complicated by Diaz and the reader’s own obvious participation in fiction of another kind, and Ida’s description of the heady intoxication of literature is pitch perfect in its awestruck adoration:

‘Yet back then I had never experienced anything like that language. And it spoke to me. It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. I also understood that this ambiguity could only work in conjunction with discipline – the calm precision of Vanner’s sentences, his unfussy vocabulary, his reluctance to deploy rhetorical devices we identify with “artistic prose” while still retaining a distinctive style. Lucidity, he seemed to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning – much like a transparent thing stacked in between others. My literary taste has changed since then, and Bonds has been displaced by other books. But Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.’

The conjuration of ‘that elusive region between reason and feeling’ serves as a manifesto for Diaz’s own style and an encapsulation of the experience of every ardent reader.  Ida’s bibliophilia is so familiar, and rings so true, propelling the feminist drive of her own narrative and her role as a female writer. This facet of TRUST is, in turn, imbued with self-reflexive complexity and subtlety, as Ida, in her quest for truth, is cast as an unreliable narrator, and made all the more slippery by her own self-awareness and her familiarity with terms like gaslighting. The twin concepts of Ida’s battle against the warring narratives of her father and finance capitalism, inflected by the capacity of the latter to alter and silence competing voices, and her own self-identification as a revisionist, feminist author, form a wonderfully intricate and clever narrative mesh that neither comes across as arrogant or showy, nor results in any loss of empathy. 

As a novel, TRUST is almost impossible to categorise, shifting as it does between memoir, metafiction, novel, and sociopolitical critique. With its subtle implication of ideas of doubling and the uncanny, as well as its knotty, propulsive plot of dark secrecy and hinted violence, TRUST is perhaps best conceived of as a capitalist gothic, upending understandings of narrative authenticity and reliability even as it reaches beyond its own pages to troubling suggestions about the society we inhabit. This layered complexity is harmonised with Diaz’s evident relish for his craft, as the carefully-wrought elegance of the prose sings with all the joy of near-religious devotion to literature. Diaz’s style is characterised by what he himself terms ‘the bliss of impersonality’, tying in with the unsentimental beauty of his debut, In The Distance, particularly in his descriptions of landscape: 

‘Morning brought out a deeper sort of white from the changeless snows capping the peaks on either side of the valley, which, later in the midday sun, would become blinding splinters. A pastoral bell echoed across the sky, dappled with flocks of small solid clouds, while unseen birds found themselves, yet again, unable to break their bondage to their two or four notes. The air was laced with the scent of water, stone, and the long-dead things that, darkly, were finding their way back to life deep under the dew-soaked dirt. During that unpopulated hour, the buildings ceased to be objects of artifice and industry to reveal the nature fossilised in them and come forth in their mineral presence. The breeze dissolved in stiller air; the treetops, so green they were black against the blue, stopped swaying. And for a moment, there was no struggle and all was at rest, because time seemed to have arrived at its destination.’

In TRUST, Diaz has written an immensely impressive follow-up to the promise of his debut, and its near-perfect ending is suggestive of his future capacity to recalibrate familiar American themes and narratives with kaleidoscopic insight and artistry.