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BOOKS I READ: Trust by Hernan Diaz (2022). Andrew Bevel is a Wall Street financier riding the boom of the roaring twenties to staggering riches, leaving him anxious about his legacy. Mildred, his wife, offers connections to the musicians, the arts, and philanthropy. When she gets sick, he spares no expense for her care. A fictionalized account of their lives, as Benjamin and Helen Rask, makes up the first part of the four perspectives in the book. In this novel within a novel, the author, Harold Vanner, highlights Benjamin’s remoteness and the Helen’s mental instability and subsequent drastic treatments, painting them as wholly unsympathetic figures.
The second part of the book is Bevel’s autobiography, an attempt to correct the record, especially around Vanner’s depictions of Mildred’s treatments. In the third and fourth segments, we meet young Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian anarchist, hired for her first writing job as the ghostwriter for Bevel soon after Mildred dies. Ida’s memoir recounts what it was like working with Andrew Bevel. After learning that their mansion on East 87th Street is being turned into a museum, she resumes her research on the Bevels. While exploring the archived papers of the couple, she discovers new details that Andrew Bevel was loath to share.
Amid the novel, I walked over to East 87th to have a look around to see if I could determine what inspired Diaz to place the mansion there. The sole remaining mansion on the block between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue is The Liederkranz Club at 6 East 87th Street, which is used for musical presentations, similar to the Bevel House, but it doesn’t seem grand enough to be a mansion of the Gilded Age. The long-ago-demolished Phipps Mansion, on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and East 87th, across the street from the Liederkranz Club, has a better chance of being the inspiration for the opulent Bevel House.
Hernan Diaz was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Trust. His prior novel In the Distance was a finalist in 2018.
Pick up a copy of Trust at my Bookshop.org affiliate stand. Check out my reading-log. The previous entry was:
