Trust

 Trust

By Hernan Diaz

The title of this novel is a play on the two themes explored throughout. On the one hand, it is a reference

to money, apt considering the book revolves around the rise of a financier who predicts the stock market plunge of 1929 and winds up unimaginably wealthy. Perhaps more interestingly, though, it refers to the ways in which reality often conforms to the person who owns its narrative. As the financier in question, Andrew Bevel, tells his secretary-cum-ghost-writer: "My job is about being right. Always. If I'm ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake." And as the father of ghost-writer Ida Perenza claims, "History itself is just a fiction -- a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That's what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money. Money at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously."

As if to prove this point, Diaz starts the novel with a novel-within-a-novel called Bonds, which tells the story of a Bevel-like financier, his rise to enormous wealth, and the mental decline that ultimately results in the death of his wife. I was fully prepared for the next section of the book to pick up where the last left off. Instead the reader is given My Life by Andrew Bevel, which is confusing, not only because it is unfinished, but also because much of it seems to echo Bonds. The two are connected in the third portion of the book, in which Ida looks back at her time working for Bevel. Turns out, Bevel's autobiography is a response to Bonds, which he found inaccurate and appalling. And it is at this point that I caught on to what the author was doing -- 193 pages in. I felt a little foolish until I read this review on NPR, the author of which felt similarly. Then there is the final section of the book, transcribed diaries of Bevel's wife that call into question who was responsible for the Bevel fortune. The diaries seem to claim it was she who developed the investing strategy that led to the wealth. Then again, she writes them in the days before succumbing to cancer, when she is regularly on morphine.

So, who to "trust"? I don't know, but I do know this was an engrossing read. After reading part one of the novel, I was beginning to wonder why the book had been long listed for the Booker Prize. But the narrative shifts made it clear. It is the rare book that keeps you engaged in the plot while also raising thought-provoking questions along the way.