TRUST, by Hernan Diaz
“The secret of all great fortunes, when there’s no obvious explanation for them, is always some forgotten crime.” These words come from “Le Père Goriot” (1835), Honoré de Balzac’s great novel about the mysteries of Paris, and in English they’re most often quoted without the qualifying phrase in the middle. After all, what counts as an obvious explanation? The ownership of land? Balzac’s society might have thought so; now we ask how that land was first acquired. Innovation? Maybe, but take a closer look at the human costs and natural resources needed to bring ideas to market.
Of course, we also have to consider who’s speaking. Balzac puts those words in the mouth of a master criminal, and then adds a final twist. The crime has been “forgotten, mind you, because it’s been properly handled,” the bodies neatly disposed of and the bank notes washed clean.
That’s the hope anyway — or the fear, depending on whose side you’re on — and that’s the world Hernan Diaz explores in “Trust,” his intricate, cunning and consistently surprising second novel. Trust: both a moral quality and a financial arrangement, as though virtue and money were synonymous. The term also has a literary bearing: Can we trust this tale? Is this narrator reliable? Diaz breaks the book into four sections, and the title of the first one is similarly ambiguous, echoing that of the whole work. It’s called “Bonds” and presented as a novel written in the third person by someone named Harold Vanner. We won’t know who he is until the later sections, many pages after “Bonds” is over; let’s call him a forgotten novelist, whose case has been properly handled.
“Bonds” begins comfortably, its assured prose the appropriate instrument for its tale of a well-upholstered life: “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.” We are in old-money New York in the last years of the 19th century, and though this world will remind readers of Edith Wharton, Diaz has a much keener interest in just how that money works. Industrialists have replaced merchants as the city’s rulers, and will in turn be replaced by financiers. Rask comes from a family of tobacco traders, but he hates “the primitive sucking and puffing” that a good cigar requires. As soon as his father dies, he sells out and begins to play the market: to play it not as one plays golf or baseball but as a musician plays an instrument, caressing its strings, lightly pressing this key or that.
Rask will become a virtuoso of money, but he never connects the tunes he plays to any effect they might have on the world outside. Instead he views “capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill and may die. But it is clean. … The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details.” Diaz’s own prose keeps an antiseptic distance of its own, no matter who his narrator might be. His superb first novel, “In the Distance,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is set in the American West during the Gold Rush, and its language creates a world in which both physical and psychic space seem stretched. Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person. Diaz relies in contrast on a far one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and dispassionate. In both books, he reports on his characters’ inner lives instead of dramatizing them, and in Vanner’s hands especially, the result reads more like a biography than a novel: a narrative without dialogue, in which Rask’s life is given to us more often in summary than in scenes.
It’s a disorienting but effective way to present a character who seems almost entirely without an inner life of his own, whose whole being lies in anticipating the clickety-click of a ticker tape. Still, the rich man does eventually discover that he is in want of a wife. His choice is a young woman named Helen Brevoort, an American girl from an old Knickerbocker family who has been raised in Europe. She’s interested in the arts and philanthropy, and she also has strange talents of her own, including a memory so faultless that after a brief glance she can recite from two randomly chosen books at once, alternating them sentence by sentence. But no talent is without its price, and hers will eventually lead her to a Swiss sanitarium.
So add Henry James to Wharton, and Thomas Mann too. Diaz’s first book was a study of Jorge Luis Borges, and like the Argentine master he has the whole literary past at his fingertips. “Bonds” sets the tune on which the novel’s three other sections play variations, and I’ve concentrated on it in order to avoid any spoilers; for much of the novel’s pleasure derives from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises.
Still, I can say that the second part claims to be a memoir by another financier, its pages full of notes meant to be developed later, and full as well of self-exculpation. This man claims he only ever wanted what was good and right for his country, and that includes his attempt to short the entire stock market in advance of the Great Depression. The book’s third and longest part is in the voice of an Italian American novelist, Ida Partenza, the Brooklyn-born daughter of an anarchist printer: an old woman now, in the 1990s, recounting a story from her youth that will make us distrust the entirety of the novel’s first two sections. I won’t say anything about the brief fourth narrative except that it too revises everything that has come before.
“Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was.” Those words are as true of this exhilarating and intelligent novel as they are of the mysterious character who speaks them, a figure hidden at the center of money’s web. Taken together, the four parts make “Trust” into a strangely self-reflexive work: strangely, because unlike some metafictional exercises this book does more than chase its own tail. The true circularity here lies in the workings of capital, in a monetary system so self-referential that it has forgotten what Diaz himself remembers. For “Trust” always acknowledges the world that lies outside its own pages. It recognizes the human costs of a great fortune, even though its characters can see nothing beyond their own calculations; they are most guilty when most innocent, most enthralled by the abstraction of money itself. Diaz gives an extreme form of that fascination to his most attractive character, who says, “Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future,” like a modernist writer dealing with the flux and flow of consciousness. The speaker of those words cannot even imagine that such a fortune might hide a crime. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Michael Gorra’s books include “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War” and “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece.” He teaches at Smith.
TRUST, by Hernan Diaz | 402 pp. | Riverhead Books. | $28.
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