By Hernan Diaz, and published in 2022, Trust is one of those books that comes laden with accolades. In its year of publication it won the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The following year it shared a Pulitzer Prize with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead. Viet Thanh Nguyen, definitely someone whose opinion I'd trust, listed it as one of the six books he'd most enjoyed in 2023.

Those plaudits weren't actually why I came to it, though. I was most interested in the fact that Diaz is another of the AWIALNTO (Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own). We've had a number of these on the Cushion now, most recently Megha Majumdar. But Diaz is particularly complex. Born in Argentina, he was two years old when his family fled the aftermath of the 1975 coup, and settled in Sweden. So he was schooled in Swedish until he was about nine. They then returned to Argentina, where he studied literature at university, and now "speaks a Spanish vernacular unmistakably rooted in Buenos Aires". He has lived in New York for decades, and before that lived briefly in London, but that's not why he writes in English, he says. Rather, it's the other way round. He lives in an anglophone environment BECAUSE he loves English...: "I started reading literature in English as a teenager, and that tradition inexplicably appealed to me on an emotional level. I fell in love with the language. It sounds corny, but there is no other way to explain it; the feeling is more important than the reason."

I opted for the audio-version of Trust, in which the book's four sections are very capably narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathan Davis, Mozhan Marno, and Orlagh Cassidy.



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The rest of this post is riddled with spoilers, so beware. But I actually wish I'd read a few such articles before I started the book... The structure, you see, is disconcertingly odd... And having finished, and thought about it, and read about it, I'm still not sure I actually like it.

The first part is a short novel entitled Bonds. It's written by one Harold Vanner (all these pieces and their authors and subjects are fictional, by the way), and it's the biography of an American financier called Benjamin Rask, and his wife, Helen. It's dry, I have to say. In an interview, Diaz says this part "is written in the realistic tone of the late 19th-century American tradition. It’s a novel-within-a-novel that does something the form no longer allows, which is to pay homage to writers like Edith Wharton and Henry James." Except that this felt like much harder work than either of those two...

There are two focal points for this section. One is finance (Benjamin, who comes from a successful business family, is very shrewd, and manages to profit from the 1929 Wall Street Crash, which makes some people suspect he had a hand in engineering it). The other is his relationship with Helen, who ends up mentally ill (as did her father), and dies in a Swiss sanatorium during the course of her electric shock treatment.

The second section, a memoir by Andrew Bevel, employs a gratingly bombastic and sententious tone. The way the details are similar-but-different to what we've just heard indicates that Andrew is the person upon whom the fictional character of Benjamin Rask is based. The memoir is not complete (whole sections are still in note form), but it becomes clear that key elements diverge from Vanner's account. There's absolutely nothing suspect about Benjamin's dealings; he's just very smart, and is acting totally in the service of the greater good, which is the American economy. And his wife, Mildred, absolutely did not suffer from mental illness, but rather from cancer.

All this has been quite -- well, turgid sounds a bit cruel, but I defy you to find it engaging... And you're definitely wondering -- well, I was -- what on earth is going on here...?

Which is when you jump onto the internet, to find out what you're missing... And find that this blogger has gone through a similar experience: "I like to know exactly what I am holding in my hands when I begin reading, at least as regards tone or vibes and definitely structure. I'm not a fan of being confused until I figure it out a few chapters in." I'm perhaps a little more tolerant of confusion -- but yes, basically that... I'd listened for ages, couldn't see where this was going, and felt just a little cross about it.

X
Geneva, 2023. If there's a sanatorium, it's usually Switzerland...

Then two things happened. First, it's always reassuring when someone tells you you're not alone (and confirms you've not missed something major with regard to the structure). Second, the third section really takes off...

This third part is narrated by Ida Partenza. It divides into two timelines: The 1980s, when she's a successful writer, and is visiting the Bevel home, which has recently opened as a museum and archive; and back in the late 1930s, when -- it turns out -- she has been working as a ghostwriter for Andrew Bevel...

Ah, interesting... She honed that very macho style in order to provide the gravitas the great man demanded, and she did it by reading countless memoirs of other great men, all drawn to that tone like bees to a honeypot. (Recounting his research, Diaz says: "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.") Partenza's memoir shows us the real Bevel: Self-centred to a degree that only the rich can be; controlling; all-seeing; single-minded... He didn't like the Vanner book, so he bought the publishing company, pulped the books, and tied the author up in endless lawsuits. He knows all about Partenza (knowledge that includes her slightly dodgy, anarchist-leaning father, and therefore constitutes a veiled threat in case she has any ideas of not toeing the line).

But what she doesn't really get close to is Mildred... Bevel speaks of her with fondness, but redacts any sections that actually reveal the intelligent, discerning woman he describes her as. He claims his wife "saved" him by making a home for him, and he therefore insists that Partenza focus on Mildred's simple, domestic, child-like qualities. He's not too worried about the "truth", and encourages his ghostwriter to create homely little incidents that will capture the reader's imagination. He internalizes these to the extent that he quotes them back to her as though they really happened to him...

So that's all very intriguing. The story of the story. The story of how an uber-rich man's story was penned by a poverty-stricken young woman. Pushing the house of mirrors even further, Partenza responds to a blackmail attempt by concocting yet another version of Bevel's life -- until she realizes that this extortion stunt has been thought up by her low-down, self-serving journalist boyfriend.

The fourth section is a fragment of Mildred's diary, which Ida finds concealed in her papers in the newly opened archive. The style here is dreamy and lyrical. This is a woman who knows she's very sick, but still has many lucid days, and considerable brain power. We recognize her agency far more than we have done so far, as we listen to her recalling her role in promoting avant-garde music; thinking up schemes to effectively support charitable institutions; and -- most tellingly -- offering her husband the financial advice that has made him so rich and famous.

But, of course, given the slipperiness that characterizes the narrations in this book, how do we know the fragment is real? How do we know that Ida -- frustrated by not finding out more about Mildred -- didn't just make it up...?



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So the epistemological point is a good one. How do we know how to trust any account of anything? Do we instinctively give more weight to a particular genre, or a particular voice? Where is the border between fact and fiction?

And the gender point is a good one, too (although we do rather see it coming). The record erases women. All. The. Time. And it misrepresents women. Whatever you're writing, rest assured it will sell better if the woman is mad or sweet, rather than sharp and savvy.

But... I still have my doubts about this structure... In an interview with David Naimon, Diaz explains his fascination with the framed narrative: "It’s a way that literature has to construct its own referential context and free itself from the supposed obligation to interact, mimic, or reflect a referential reality... What I like about it then is that it emphasizes the autonomy of literature, how it can become a self-contained, self-sufficient realm, even to the point of creating its own outside. This is what to me is so wondrous about framed narratives, that it’s literature creating a reality for itself. How? With more literature..."

It's all very "Borgesian", apparently. (Diaz is himself a scholar of Jorge Luis Borges, and has described the way he builds up "nesting worlds", in which each layer questions the authenticity of the one that came before it.)

Which is fair enough. But you have to have a lot of the titular "trust" to believe your readers -- blind to what's going on -- will follow you through those first two arid sections (in the printed version they apparently take up about 190 pages), and will still be there to emerge with you onto the sunny uplands of Ida Partenza's account. I wonder how many readers fell by the wayside, thinking WTF... And how many of those who persisted ended up feeling it was a gimmick, a text that "spoofs so much that it winds up spoofing itself"?