My Presentation on Trust by Hernan Diaz
Women’s University Club March 12, 2024
I had a great audience at the Women’s University Club for my presentation on Trust by Hernan Diaz. I explained how I thought Diaz won the prize. We discussed afterwards how a prize influences buying or reading a book.
Why I Think The Pulitzer Committee Liked This Novel
Trust is fiction, contemporary literature published in 2022. It’s a big book. It weighs more than a pound with 402 pages. Reading this book is a workout, a marathon. I think the elements of this book that resonate with the Pulitzer Fiction Committee include:
The Pulitzer Prize typically rewards Americana. Trust takes place on Wall Street in New York City mostly in the 1920s and 30s, a tumultuous era of American history.
Abstract capital as the subject lends another academic weight or strength to the novel. This is a serious story.
The intricacy of the four book structure within the book is intriguing. It’s a literary puzzle to solve and admire.
Being the well-read people they are, I have assumed that the jurors on the fiction committee could spot the reading list behind each section or at least part of it. The reading or research list demonstrates scholarly seriousness and it is exciting or rewarding to recognize the novels of inspiration.
The author provides the details of his research in interviews. He is proud of his work. He cites Jorge Louis Borges, as a profound influence on his life and work. “I wouldn’t be the person I am without Borges.” If like me, you haven’t thought about or read Borges in a long time, here is a short description provided by the New Yorker magazine: “Few artists have built grand structures on such uncertain foundations as Jorge Luis Borges. Doubt was the sacred principle of his work, its animating force and, frequently, its message. To read his stories is to experience the dissolution of all certainty, all assumption about the reliability of your experience of the world.” How about that quicksand for a foundation? Keep this in mind while reading Trust. Diaz credits Borges first for the concept of nesting the different stories within each other in Trust. The other important thing about Diaz’s hero is that he never wrote a novel. Borges, the Argentine philosopher, poet and innovative writer of essays and short “stories that combine mystery, fantasy, riddles, metafiction, and much else besides.” Diaz has written a book about Borges.
“Doubt was the sacred principle of his work, (Jorge Louis Borges) its animating force and, frequently, its message.”
Diaz did read extensively for each book within the book to acquire the knowledge, tone and cadence of the era. He began with Theodore Dreiser and his novel The Financier a story of ambition, power and capitalism published in 1912. Diaz says, “… Dreiser is important to me because he’s one of the few authors in the American canon who truly deals with the intricacies of finance. So does Upton Sinclair in The Moneychangers, published in 1908. I think it’s meaningful that this book also happens to be out of print, which tells you something about the place these narratives have in our literary tradition.”
That was followed by several novels of the 1920 era by Edith Wharton and Henry James. Diaz says of them, “She and Henry James are, of course, palpable presences in the first section. But more in terms of tone, form, and atmosphere. They were both rather priggish when it came to money—which was famously a taboo in their set. I think they deal with the intricacies of class more than with the labyrinths of capital. They’re not really concerned with labor, which is the foundation of capital. In their world, money is seldom “made;” it’s mostly “already there.” Which means they excuse themselves from looking at the many forms of injustice that necessarily go into the primitive accumulation behind every fortune.”
Those are a few examples of the research for the first book within the book. This level of research is not the work of an ordinary fiction writer. Although many authors say they are readers of other’s fiction, it’s hard to guess who would have the time to do this type of research when the typical publisher relentlessly wants new books so the fans don’t forget you. How many authors can you think of who publish every five or ten years? That’s slow in the publishing industry. I can only think of Donna Tart, who I revere, who is fine with the fact it takes her so long to write a book. She was quoted once in an interview that she would go nuts if she had to go on a book tour every two years, even every ten years was tough. If I had time, I would go back to her beginning with The Secret History and see how her publishers have coped with the brutal consolidation of the industry over the last 30 years with her three books.
Trust is published by Riverhead that specializes in prize winning books. In my opinion, that is not accidental. When you almost win the Pulitzer as an unknown, what author wouldn’t make a deal with the best publisher he could find. He probably had a line outside his Brooklyn apartment wanting to get to know him after his first novel almost won the Pulitzer.
Who is The Author Hernan Diaz?
His background is multinational. The Paris Review on Oct 10, 2017, quoted Diaz, “I was born in Argentina, and I left when I was two years old—my family moved to Sweden. I grew up in Stockholm, with Swedish as my first social tongue, until my family moved back to Argentina when I was about nine. I didn’t feel quite at home in Buenos Aires, so as soon as I could, I left for London, where I lived for a couple of years in my early twenties. From London I moved to New York, and I’ve been here for almost twenty years now.”
This was the year 2017 that Hernan Diaz dropped from the sky or catapulted from below ground to the top literary echelons, unannounced and unheard of by anyone, anywhere when his first novel, In the Distance, was discovered. The New York Times reported, “He had no agent when he answered an open call for manuscripts by the nonprofit Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, which published the novel last October. In April Mr. Diaz was named a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, causing book reviewers around the country to say, who?” The Pulitzer Fiction winner that year was Less by Andrew Sean Greer.
My favorite part of the description of Diaz’s trajectory into the public eye is that he was reported to be a scholar and lived in Brooklyn. I thought, wow, a scholar, that’s like he spends his days at the library! He’s not listed as a professor or a Ph.D. student. He’s obsessed with reading and writing. Later I read he got a fellowship during the pandemic and worked on Trust in the New York Public Library alone with nobody but the security guards.
I think Diaz toiling away for years is a romantic story. His first novel also involved reading many books. It tells a long, difficult story of a penniless Swedish immigrant, who speaks no English, walking from San Francisco to New York in the 1850s, pre-civil war to find his brother because he took the wrong boat to America. He experienced the American West in the opposite direction of many immigrants and perhaps upside down or sideways. Has anyone read Into the Distance?
A small marketing aside: Now an experienced author with a prestigious New York publisher, Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust is sold always with the Pulitzer Fiction Winner gold coin shaped emblem on the cover. Researching what characterizes a Pulitzer winner on the Pulitzer web site, I learn that Diaz shared the prize with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. If you look at the web site of her publisher, there is no mention of Kingsolver sharing of the prize. That’s book selling for you. One more bit of Pulitzer trivia: How many times has our own Nancy Pearl been a juror on the Fiction committee? Twice. 2018 Less, 2009, Olive Kitteridge. I wonder if she voted for Less or in the Distance.
What’s Going On In The Novel Trust?
Each of the four books is rewriting history to suit somebody who didn’t like the previous version of history. The first book, titled Bonds by Harold Vanner, is a best-selling dramatic tale of New York’s richest man and his philanthropist wife, Benjamin and Helen Rask. It describes the high society people they interact with which is contentious as the Rasks are somewhat new money, despite being huge money. Mental illness and hideous abuse in a Swiss sanitorium cause the death of Helen and it’s all Benjamin’s fault in this book. The real husband and wife, who this fiction is loosely based on, Andrew Bevel and his deceased wife Mildred, find it not flattering and not true. To correct this telling and make sure the world knows of Andrew’s important contribution to history, he begins to write the next book, a memoir titled, My Life.
In an interview Diaz said, “this fragmentary autobiography of this “Great Man” echoes the rhetoric of so many self-serving memoirs I had to study in preparation for this part. It was mind-blowing to read, in book after book, how absolutely certain these men were that the stories of their faultless lives deserved to be heard. This section of the book aims, among other things, to defamiliarize certain voices we have been taught to trust in historical documents.”
I was amused by how the chapters in this memoir contained many notes and sometimes lists such as: More about Mother; More about Mother’s wonderful qualities in the next chapter; Math in great detail. Precocious talent. Anecdotes.
With these notes you realize that Andrew Bevel has learned writing the story of his life is too difficult and hires Ida Partenza to ghostwrite his book into the third book, a memoir of the memoir titled, A Memoir, Remembered. I loved the character Ida Partenza / Ida Prentice. She is a young woman, an extraordinary typist and although she never attended school is well read and a good writer because her father is a printer and publisher, so she literally knows words backwards and forwards. Getting a job in the depression was tough. Ida was young and Italian, the antithesis of the image being built over on Fifth Avenue at Andrew Bevel’s mansion.
I had a relative who was a young woman in the depression at the same time as Ida who went to apply to work in a shoe store. Like Ida, it was the dead of winter and when she arrived early, there were already 200 girls in front of her and more kept coming. It seemed hopeless but she waited hours in the snow because her family needed the job.
To become Andrew Bevel’s secretary, every applicant took the same tests. No men applied for this job. After Ida’s excellent accuracy and speed typing tests she had a short amount of time to write a creative piece which impressed her future employer, got her an additional interview and the ghostwriter job he called being a secretary. In the case of my relative, the system was more cruel. There was no test, just the employer walking the line midday surveying the hundreds of faces of the applicants. My relative was chosen because of her smile or her red hair and worked at the shoe store until she retired and moved to Florida. After about 20 years, she became the wife of the owner of the shoe store which she was very happy about.
Ida Partenza deserves her own book apart from this one. She could star in a long running series for books or television showing how she juggled all the outrageous inconsistencies in her employer and went on to have a successful career, after Bevel, if only Diaz had given us the details of this career in Trust. Ida tried to reconcile working for ‘the man’ with her father’s politics in this era of repressed and silent women. That reconciliation came down to money. Ida and her father needed it. They were months behind on the rent, credit at the grocery store and other things. Ida’s ingenuity first triumphed over Andrew Bevel’s natural speaking voice which was nothing much to listen to. He wanted to sound like one of the great men of American history, not like himself. So Ida follows Diaz’s path to to the library to read many books about men like Andrew Carnegie to create the content of finance and the tone of voice her employer desires. She learns more about how fortunes are made and finds it’s exactly like her dad told her why we should all be anarchists. Too soon in the progress of the memoir, Andrew Bevel tells her he doesn’t have time to work on the book with her during the day. He needs her to live in an apartment he has rented and furnished for her near the mansion so she can work whenever he has time. It’s a good guess that means the odd hours after dark. Leaving Brooklyn and her father’s apartment where she had lived her whole life to live close to her employer, the richest man in NYC was very difficult for her. It didn’t look right to her, her father, her boyfriend or anybody else. Women in those days stayed with their family until they married.
Andrew Bevel also tells Ida such a different story of his plain, reclusive wife, who died of cancer despite his tremendous support and unlimited funds for her care, Ida begins to see she should be researching the dead wife which ultimately, many years later leads to the fourth book, Futures by Mildred Bevel. I’ll not say anything about this book to protect the ambitious readers in the audience.
As you now know, a ton of research, writing and rewriting in four tones of voice was required to produce this novel. My guess is that the experts who sit on the Pulitzer Fiction Committee could see all of this and think it’s award winning, if the story lives up to the construction of the novel.
What Are The Main Themes?
Money, is always an alluring subject. The nature of money, making money, losing money and the men who can make it are exhaustively described and dwelled upon. Capitalism is examined from several philosophical and historical points of view. The novel Trust is to me a shrine to the capital markets and the men who know how to manipulate the markets. The drama surrounding money is as old as history but this story is deeply seated in 20th century Americana, an important part of the American dream and history of America.
Consider that the Bevel’s are originally ostracized by NY society because they are new money, the mysterious Wall Street kind of money. Mildred came from an old respected family but they had exhausted their fortune and Bevel was happy to supply his for Mildred and her mother to create a lifestyle that would be the envy of everyone. After that hard battle is fought to get those old money people in the door of their Fifth Avenue mansion for musical performances by the top talent of the day, Andrew Bevel is blamed for the stock market crash of 1929, while making a new fortune by shorting the market that fell and the great depression that followed. Who’s more evil than that? The Bevel’s are ostracized again. We love to hate evil and watch the evil get their punishment. Greed is never pretty and is a magnet to those who revel in exposing ugliness. Andrew Bevel attracts a great deal of negative press which outrages him. Of course, Mildred must die in some horrible way.
Marginalizing women is a pervasive element in Trust. The historical business model has always required slave labor. In this case, the slave labor is women. Ida bravely soldiers on for Andrew Bevel despite the creepiness she feels about him, the sick feeling of having sold herself and her horror of how much she loves riding in his limousine.
Andrew Bevel begins marginalizing his wife recasting her in his memoir and each subsequent retelling, as a sweet, simple woman who never did anything much but be a good wife. Her mathematics skills were the first to be hidden, her interest in music and philanthropy soon followed.
Not a theme, but a feature of the novel is Double meanings for many words and other acrobatic writing appear throughout. According to me, speaking several languages makes Diaz extra clever at constructing word plays. For example the title of the book is a solitary word, Trust which is a financial entity that holds assets for someone else. Trust is a foundation of human relationships, desire, emotion, I wish I could trust you. Who can I trust in this novel? The first of the four books inside Trust, is Bonds, again a financial investment term and another foundation of human relationships. Ida Prentice sounds a lot like ‘apprentice.’ In Italian al punto di partenza means to come full circle and Ida Partenza, with her insights into Bevel, tries to close the loop on his life.
One Professional Opinion About How Diaz Handles Money
I wanted to share with you at least one respected source knowledgeable about finance. Here’s what The Harvard Review said: “This intricate novel possesses a rare, fractal beauty: patterns first noticeable in the tiny twigs of its sentences recur in the branches of its sections and yet again in the shape of the whole. One character in Trust calls money a fiction. Finance capital, then, is “the fiction of a fiction.” And Trust, you might say, is the fiction of the fiction of a fiction, whose patterns extend well beyond its pages. Human lives rise and fall, but the greed of corporations and family fortunes persists. “Self-made” men trade on the stolen labor of women and the underclass. And the wealthy will stop at nothing—they will even “bend and align reality” itself—to tell their story in their own way. But, as Trust shows, theirs must not be the last word.”
The Most Important Characters
Andrew Bevel / Benjamin Rask is technically the star of the four books. He is presented as a child mathematical savant, a financial genius, the man who caused the stock market crash of 1929, a reclusive billionaire, a neurotic, introverted or possibly unfeeling human barely capable of interaction with other people. Although he says he doesn’t read books, he has an image of what great men sound like. He says and believes things like: “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.”
My favorite example of his belief in his own power concerns his hatred for Harold Vanner, the author of Bonds. He purchases every copy published, has them burned and has the library remove Vanner from the card catalogue as though he never existed as a human or writer. As you might guess, the library does that because Bevel is a generous donor. History is always being rewritten.
Mildred Bevel / Helen Rask was a mathematics prodigy raised in Europe because her eccentric, blue blood family lacked the income to stay in America so they became houseguests of the rich and famous wherever they were in Europe. Mildred’s scary mother routinely had her daughter perform memory parlor tricks to entertain after dinner. Not too surprising that as an adult she is as introverted and antisocial as Andrew Bevel. Music was her passion and she used Bevel’s fortune to support the arts across the US until her premature death.
Ida Prentice/Ida Partenza is a smart woman who has been raised and educated by her father, an anarchist, who was forced to leave Italy because of his politics. He never bought into the American dream. She goes by Prentice when job hunting to hide her Italian heritage. They live in a poor dwelling in Brooklyn with the rest of the Italians who are the immigrants of the era to mistreat and malign. They have a printing press in their tiny apartment which produces freedom literature and party invitations as well as single copies of books and stories that Ida writes as a kid.
Ida, like her creator, Diaz, is a prolific reader and she can quote all the great men her father idolizes but it brought tears to my eyes when she cited as her inspirations, Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. “These women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world.… They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: The reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted.”
Ida’s father, the anarchist/printer/publisher, says, “Money is a fantastic commodity. You can't eat or wear money, but it represents all the food and clothes in the world. This is why it's a fiction. ... Stocks, shares, bonds. Do you think any of these things those bandits across the river buy and sell represent any real, concrete value? No. ... That's what all these criminals trade in: fictions.”
In Closing
To put closing punctuation on this presentation I want to tell you I started reading Trust almost a year ago and it lingered on my bedside table. I ready many books in between. I decided I didn’t trust my memory or my feelings so I sat down with it again on a rainy day in January this year and read one half in one day and the other half the next day so it would be fresh in my mind what happened, didn’t happen, and no longer happened. The complex structure of the four books within the book and the alternate names for the characters is much easier to grasp in a short reading window. What overwhelmed me was the thought and planning of the author. He must have created a long list of historical events, people, experiences and philosophy he wanted to include in this book. The ambition of it, and in it, is admirable to me. I think he aimed for the Pulitzer from the beginning. This is how Diaz won a Pulitzer, one brick at a time creating a new American novel. He started with Borges as the foundation; added many books of the era for history, reference and tone. He chose abstract capital as his topic and its impact on American history. He created one likeable character in Ida Partenza. He knew how to do it and was willing to put in all the time necessary. I’m sure his publisher was helpful. I say congratulations to Hernan Diaz for his hard work and accomplishment.
Even though book four is yet to come for many of you with surprises and twists, this is my end point. I think everyone who reads this book deserves a prize of some sort. You will be rewarded by learning a great deal about capitalism and class, the roaring twenties, the depression that followed, financial instruments as well as a lesson in how poorly women were treated in that era. Ida Partenza might become a new name in the women’s rights movement along with Elizabeth Zott, our friend from Lessons in Chemistry.
To me the failing of the novel, despite the Pulitzer Prize, is I don’t care about any of the characters except Ida. There’s no compelling warmth, desire or drama in the story to me that would make a good movie. You will probably not think Trust changed your life, nor tell everyone you know to read it. I have yet to run into anyone who has read it who told me they loved it. One friend said they liked it when they had finished reading it.
I’m glad I read it because it brought us here together. Thank you Irene Peters for insisting I stay with this book when I wanted to choose another book six months ago. It has been a pleasure talking to you today about all these things. Thank you again for coming.
Now I’d like to ask you a few questions about your reading. How many of you prefer to read a prize winning book? What are your favorite literary prizes? Who prefers to get reading ideas from the best seller’s lists? Who relies on favorite reviewers? Who are your favorite reviewers?