Review: Trust by Hernan Diaz

Reviewed by Josh Zimmerer

Riverhead Books. 2022. 416 pages.

Toward the end of Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust, Mildred Bevel—the recurrent dying wife of the novel’s towering figure, Andrew Bevel—contemplates an unseen church bell’s melody, writing that its notes function “like a retrograde or a palindrome.” It ascends and then descends across the same four notes. But then, through analogizing the bell’s melody with the stock market, she reconfigures the palindromic melody, following the same structure but in a different direction. Suddenly, a new melody appears. It retains its shape but returns to a new origin: “a song played in reverse and on its head.”

Nothing succinctly summarizes the hypnotic and elusive quality of Diaz’s novel quite like this. Told through four fictional books—a biographic novel, an unfinished autobiography, a memoir, and a journal—Trust repeatedly examines the life of Andrew Bevel, an early twentieth century stock market billionaire, and his wife Mildred: his prodigious rise as an investor, the couple’s fateful encounter, Mildred’s sudden illness and death, and Andrew’s diminutive fall in stature after his wife’s death. Yet, with each retelling, something new is revealed and even more is obscured. The novel is an ongoing process of myth-making and reinvention, an act even the novel sometimes falls prey to.

A lot of this mythologizing is directed toward Andrew. Was he an advantageous savant who turned meager generational wealth into an incomprehensible fortune, or was he a privileged child of extensive wealth who simply allowed his investments do what they do best, passively fester and grow? Was he an enigmatic recluse or simply someone who prioritized his privacy? A shadow or a man? Diaz pulls from various literary sources to further dramatize these dichotomies. While the novel-within-a-novel casts a disdainful eye upon Bevel, his unfinished autobiography reads like a Gospel of Wealth knock-off, spending more time outlining his opinions on capitalism and the value of individualism than on his upbringing or his relationship with his wife. Likewise, the memoir—written by the autobiography’s ghostwriter—uses its genre to simultaneously mitigate these two versions with Bevel and fully grapple with an axiom of Bevel’s philosophy: “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 yet by focusing most of this realignment of reality in Diaz’s novel on Andrew’s fortune and not Mildred’s health, in each iteration Andrew is given the full capacity of personhood, the subject of each book, while Mildred—and with her, her intrinsic illness—is relegated to object, an appendage to Andrew’s story acting either as punishment or angelic muse. When the identity of Mildred’s disease morphs from insanity to cancer from one book to the next, it has nothing to do with her, but instead functions as a correlative between Andrew and his observer. As Susan Sontag notes in Illness as Metaphor, cancer is seen as “a disease associated with affluence, with excess,” while insanity, much like tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, is a disease of “superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent.” Mildred becomes a symbol to these fictional writers and nothing more, her ailments simply a manifestation of forces outside and beyond herself.

Even the character Ida’s memoir, which tries to uncover the truth of both Bevels, can’t help but turn Mildred and her illness into a symbol reflected back onto Ida. Mildred becomes a mystery to be solved. She is the proverbial great woman behind the great man, an unseen and unrecognized force. Ida inserting her own life’s details into Andrew’s autobiography equates to Mildred developing the investment strategies Andrew used to outmaneuver the Great Depression. Again and again, it’s as if each fictional author can’t help but view this character as evidence to a thesis statement that they can’t outright say without risking exposing too much of themselves, too much of their worldview that they’ve distorted into something palatable.

Diaz, however, is just as guilty as his fictional authors in mythologizing Mildred’s illness, although not to such an extreme detriment. The overall palindromic shape of the novel begins and ends at similar truths, although one is in-universe fictional and the other in-universe non-fictional. Mildred’s journal is the ultimate revelation of the novel, reaffirming earlier suspicions and contradicting previous assumptions. Structurally it is the most fragmented, a hodge-podge of entries that range from detailed observations to truncated sentences, reflecting Mildred’s state of mind as she slowly dwindles from cancer, housed in a European sanitorium. While it may not necessarily be insanity, her condition eats away at her consciousness, her thoughts becoming circular and disjointed, an ouroboros trying to shed its skin. It’s as though this final section is trying to contradict the three previous. It tries to strip away the mythologizing, the contextualizing through Andrew, the meaning found behind her illness, and yet the novel has spent hundreds of pages getting us to this point, affirming these beliefs so that when we arrive to the grand retort it feels too little too late. Just as Francois Truffaut said, “Every film about war ends up being pro-war,” so does every narrative attempting to subvert its content ultimately in some small way reaffirms its mythos. A song played in reverse and on its head is a still a shadow of that song.

Still, Diaz’s novel is an achievement unto itself. Structurally unique and compellingly told, whatever slight missteps it may take, they pale in comparison to Diaz’s fluid and vivid prose. The first two sections of the novel, essentially the first two hundred pages, are told almost strictly through exposition. And it works. The prose never ceases to captivate, a feat few others could achieve. The novel is patient but never quiet, a ferry across the gulf separating the kingdom of the rich from the kingdom of the poor, separating what Sontag calls “the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.” While most characters in the novel cannot choose the kingdom in which they reside—each relegated to the fate of bad genes and generational wealth—we’re given a visa. We should be careful, though, not to bring too much baggage with us on our travels.

Josh Zimmerer is a writer based out of Denton, Texas. His work has appeared in Fjords Review, Cartridge Lit, Hobart, Moon City, (614) Magazine, and elsewhere.