Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play For an hour or so, she would enjoy the bliss of impersonality-of becoming pure perception, of existing only as that which saw the mountaintop, heard the bell, smelled the air.” As the sun rose, however, her monologue declined into sporadic mutterings, which, in turn, melted in silence. She continued with her soliloquy while freeing herself from under the tightly tucked blankets. “And so it was that Helen, after each sleepless night spent talking to silent snooded nurses, was taken out into the garden with the first light and left alone on a chaise facing the mountains. Diaz’s ventriloquism here is stellar: As Venner, he channels Edith Wharton in an arch yet irresistible voice. His biography is loosely re-created as fiction in Trust’s first act, “Bonds,” a thinly veiled novel written by one Harold Vanner, a hanger-on who chronicles the myth of Benjamin and Helen Rask, also a childless, affluent Manhattan couple: their opulent Fifth Avenue mansion, the shady deals that buoy them through the 1929 crash, and Helen’s fatal illness, which ends tragically in a Swiss sanatorium. A finance titan in the early 20th century, Bevel has built spectacularly on fortunes amassed by his forebears. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some. Published in 2017, Diaz’s debut, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money.
Free markets are never free, as he suggests our desire to punish often trumps our generous impulses. Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory. He structures Trust around a childless, affluent Manhattan couple, Andrew and Mildred Bevel, in a quartet of narratives that open up like Matryoshka dolls: a novel, a partial memoir, a memoir of that memoir, and a journal. He transports readers back to the Roaring Twenties and subsequent Depression, when our collective labors bore rotten fruit, seeding disparities that are still with us.
Scott Fitzgerald was dead wrong when he quipped that there are no second acts in American lives as Hernan Diaz probes in Trust, his enthralling tour de force, there are at least four wildly disparate perspectives on the rich and infamous.
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