I read someplace: Great novels aren’t written; they’re rewritten. Well, there are four parts to Trust, and each part seems to want to revise the other three. Although the impulse to revise makes Trust a far better novel than it would otherwise be,I don't think they make Trust great.
The opening, entitled Bonds, purports to be a novel-within-a-novel written by a fictional novelist by the name of Harold Vanner. It tells the life story of a New York financier by the name of Benjamin Rask in the 1920s, and it reads like an excised version of The Great Gatsby without the stylistic flourishes and the obsessive pursuit of a woman’s love that’s at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, and what made it great.In addition, its won a number of awards and been a New York Times bestseller.
Rask is presented as almost the opposite of Gatsby, a Wall Street financier void of addictions, obsessions or pleasure-drives of any kind, which, as far as I’m concerned, means Rask isn’t a human being. Likewise, in keeping with his character's personality, Diaz’s writing style is surgical yet precise in how it makes cuts and revisions to the strong emotions one finds in Fitzgerald’s work. That does not make Trust sound so appealing, does it? And yet this novel never failed to keep my interest; I always wanted to know what would happen next.
The second part of Trust purports to be the memoir of an extremely wealthy entrepreneur, one Andrew Bevel, who’s assembled notes and fully-written portions of a memoir of his life. Like Vanner’s novel, it’s fiction. The second part comes across almost as if Diaz is saying, “Hey, if you weren’t wild about Bonds, try this memoir on for size.” It’s kind of dry. After all, it was supposedly written by a Wall Street financier who seems as void of addictions as Rask is in the first part.
Bevel’s memoir are left purposely incomplete. Could it be that Bevel doesn’t wish to bore us with all the details? Or has Bevel put all of us, his readers, on a need-to-know basis? There’s a good deal of ambiguity throughout which I have no doubt is intended.
Fact: in a novel entitled Trust, I don’t always trust the narrator. Yet in today’s world replete with fake news, conspiracy theories and failing California banks, how surprising is that?
I’ll leave out the spoilers and just say, from beginning to end, Trust is an always changing yet always fascinating conundrum.
Here’s a biographical fact about Trust’s author Hernan Diaz: Before turning to novels, he wrote a literary study of Jorge Luis Borges, his fellow Argentinian. Back in the 1970s when I used to binge on Borges’ stories, I was always engaged with the writing; yet, they often left me feeling I had been put through an intellectual exercise that ultimately went nowhere. Still I couldn’t put those stories down, not at first. Like a literary “trick of the eye,” they left me fascinated yet oddly unsure what I was looking at, or where I, the reader, fit into their larger scheme.
In the end, I decided Borges’ stories were a literary curiosity. I moved on.
I’m not ready to do the same with Diaz, even though the cold, clinical nature of his writing reminds me of Borges’ style. Trust left me wondering if Diaz was doing anything beyond spinning intellectual yarns designed to titillate? Or, as we say in the Lingua Franca of today: With this novel, was there ever any there there? Your guess is as good as mine.
