Money’s unreliable narrators
Bonds, futures and securities: These products within the financial world practically offer themselves up to double-entendres. In an interpersonal relationship, these words imply closeness, vows, maybe even love. On Wall Street, they mean investments, strategy and cold hard cash. But however disparate the worlds of matrimony and finance may be, there is overlap. Both involve expectations and obligations. There is partnership. There is risk.
At the center of that Venn diagram sits “Trust,” the intellectual new historical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernan Diaz. It’s a book that presents the myths and realities of a fictional power couple who actually made money when the stock market crashed in 1929.
Diaz divides the book into four sections, four geological layers that each plunge deeper toward the core of the mystery. The fictional 1937 novel “Bonds” leads this quartet and presents the story of Benjamin and Helen Rask. Benjamin is a mathematically gifted financier who develops a secret formula to predict the movements of the market, giving him a reputation as a prophet of profits. But the skill for which he is revered eventually makes him a scapegoat after he foresees the crash, liquidates his positions, and shorts the market ahead of the disaster.
The guilt brought on by getting rich while others were losing everything and the couple’s resulting status as social pariahs send Rask’s remarkable, but delicate wife, Helen, into the throes of madness, and she spends her final days in a Swiss sanatorium.
For New Yorkers, it’s no secret who inspired “Bonds.” After all, everyone knows it was Andrew Bevel who was vilified for making a ludicrous amount of money off predicting the crash. He and his mysterious wife, Mildred, were notoriously private; reading “Bonds,” therefore, is the only way for the public to get a peek inside the gilded life they shared before Mildred’s death. It’s fiction, but it’s still a tooclose-for-comfort account for Andrew, who abhors the implications that his wife lost her mind and that his greatest successes are behind him.
To invalidate “Bonds” and prove he is not Benjamin Rask, Andrew Bevel begins a pompous love letter to individualism disguised as an autobiography. In it, he outlines his history and claims his controversial triumphs were predetermined by his financial pedigree. This incomplete and infuriatingly self-aggrandizing work makes up the second part of “Trust,” while the memoir of the ghostwriter who helped him write it, a woman who later laments her involvement, especially her assistance with the watereddown depiction of Bevel’s wife, Mildred, makes up the third. It’s only in the jaw-dropping fourth section that Mrs. Bevel finally speaks for herself.
Each section of “Trust” speaks to the last, and the reader gets to play detective, hunting for the truth amid the fiction. Yet Diaz puts the mere concept of truth under scrutiny. We’re told Andrew Bevel’s motive for writing his retaliatory autobiography is “bending and aligning reality,” as though facts can be melted and molded under the searing heat of a vast fortune. He’s not wrong. As we witness in the book, money can expose the truth, but it can also rewrite history.
With dignified and razorsharp prose, Diaz takes readers on a journey to discover who Mildred Bevel, the inspiration behind the tortured Helen
Rask, really was. “Trust” is a deliciously cerebral novel with themes of power and legacy quietly pulsing in the background as it shines a light into the dark corners of high finance. Although it takes its time warming up and may require a base level of financial knowledge to fully appreciate, it delivers a majorly impressive return on investment.