RFBC #10: Trust
How much of a novel—almost any novel—depends in one way or another on trust? Can the characters trust each other? Can the reader trust the narrator? Can the reader trust that the author has written a book that makes some kind of sense, even a crazy kind of sense as with the novel we tackled last month? A trust is also a financial instrument, of course, one designed as to let one person, a trustee, hold or use funds for the benefit of someone(s) else.
This is all grist for the mill that is Hernan Diaz’s Trust, one of the most-lauded novels of 2022 and the subject of our Radio Free Book Club discussion for April, 2023. In the simplest terms, Trust is the story of a fourth-generation New York financier and his wife, set mostly in the 1920s and ’30s, in the run-up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.
Would that it were so simple. Thankfully, the Radio Free Book Club crew is here to break it down for you. As usual, spoilers follow—both here and on our podcast, which you can find at Mixcloud or just about anywhere you stream content. Trust us: You don’t want to spoil this one.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our April 2023 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; writer, baker, and hiker Traci Cumbay; writer Robin Beery; and writer/teacher/editor Barb Shoup. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by the awesome Oreo Jones for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
Off to a slow start. Barb kicked off our discussion by announcing that if she hadn’t had to discuss Trust for the book club, she’d have dropped it 10 pages in. Traci concurred, and Robin said he’d have probably lasted longer, but not much. We all agreed: The first of Trust’s four sections, a novel-within-the-novel called Bonds, by fictional author Harold Vanner, is slow and not very interesting. It’s the story of wealthy financier Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen, and it’s written is a style critics compared with Henry James and Edith Wharton. But neither of them ever wrote anything that was such a drag.
And then…the second section of the book, My Life by Andrew Bevel, retreads much of the same ground. It seems that Bonds is a roman à clef of which Bevel and his wife Mildred are the real-life subjects. My Life is a Great Man autobiography in progress, as becomes apparent pretty quickly thanks to notes in the text prompting the writer to fill in details at a later time. The first appearance of these more-on-this-later notes is jarring; Traci initially thought she’d encountered a proofreading error that had made it into the published book. The unfinished nature of My Life brings in an element of intrigue and a suggestion that Bevel is none too happy with the fictionalized account of his life. These developments are inducement enough to keep going. But we agreed that it’s still the same none-too-interesting story told yet again, and we’re nearly halfway through the book by the time it’s over. As Robin pointed out, the notes-to-self in My Life gloss over the most potentially interesting parts of the story.
The book takes off in Part III. The third “book” in Trust is A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza, whom we quickly identify as a ghostwriter hired by Andrew Bevel to write his autobiography—which explains the notes-to-self in the last section. Ida is writing decades after she was involved with Bevel and his book; she is an old woman who’s had a successful career as a professional writer, and Bevel’s mansion has been turned into a museum. Her story revolves around her experience as Bevel’s ghost, her relationship with her Italian immigrant father—an anarchist and freelance typesetter who is somehow both a perfectionist and orthographically challenged—and a sort-of boyfriend who eventually tries blackmailing Ida to advance his own journalistic career. We all agreed Ida is a great character and that Trust was finally going somewhere worth following.
Erasing Vanner (and Mildred). As revealed in Ida’s story, Andrew Bevel is determined to blow Bonds into oblivion and make sure Harold Vanner never works again. Bevel seems particularly angry about how Vanner has treated Rask’s wife Helen in comparison with the real Mildred. For example, Helen was a great lover of challenging contemporary music—think Stravinsky—but Bevel insists her tastes were mild and conventional. At the end of Bonds, Helen dies a horrible death, a combination of madness and eczema made worse by Rask’s trust in a chemical shock treatment manufactured by a company he owns. In real life, Mildred dies of cancer, in far less dramatic fashion, and Bevel resents the implication that he was complicit in his wife’s death. It’s clear that Bevel is trying to hide some truth about Mildred, and the question of what that might be propels the story. (“Propel” might be a strong word.)
Speaking of trust: Do we trust Ida? Mostly, but not entirely. When you think about it, not everything she says rings true—particularly regarding Bevel’s ability to erase Vanner and his books from the face of the earth.
We hear from Mildred. The last section of Trust is excerpts from Mildred’s journals; allegedly, her handwriting was so bad that no one ever bothered to decipher it. Here we learn that Mildred was a financial savant, the brains behind Bevel’s stunning financial success. The Great Man has no clothes. Of course he wants to erase her. And this is the big payoff for a book that was pretty boring for nearly two hundred of its four hundred pages.
So why was Trust such a big hit? Robin suggested that setting the novel during the financial upheavals of the stock market crash and the depression attracted the interest of readers in our own unsettling times. From a writing point-of-view, the structure of the book was intriguing. But we found ourselves talking more about the structure than the characters or the plot, which seemed to us like a problem for a literary novel.
Would we recommend it? Well…Traci said she would not trust Hernan Diaz with more of her time. Barb—who liked the book better before we talked about it—would recommend it for writers interested in the structure, but didn’t find the story too compelling. Robin found the prose good even when the writing was not—but wouldn’t recommend it for people who read for character or plot. Ken had mixed feelings, and would recommend it for readers who like puzzle books. Ultimately, he didn’t love it, either.
Bonus recommendations: Traci—uncharacteristically late to the party—recommended Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Robin recommended Vladimir Nabokov’s post-Lolita novel, Pale Fire. Barb recommend Miss Benson’s Beetle — particularly the audiobook version—by Rachel Joyce. Ken recommended Joshua Ferris’s hilarious and moving Then We Came to the End.
Next month: We’ll be book clubbing Walter Mosley’s new Joe King Oliver novel, Every Man a King. Read up and join us!
