Hernan Diaz, Trust

 

- Has there ever been a novel focused on the finance industry, the major family dynasties in the US who invented and controlled it, and the ways they shaped the 20th century? This is one and it’s magnificent. A stunningly good and enjoyable read which made the Booker Prize longlist for 2022. 

- The novel is in four parts - a fictional novella written by a Harold Vanner, a controversial portrayal of an influential investor and his wife which sold in a huge numbers, and three memoirs, all seemingly addressing the realities. What, we ask, are the facts? Who can we trust? 

- The key players are Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred. It's the early 1900s leading up to the start of the depression in 1929.

- In smooth, crystal clear prose Harold Vanner's novella tells the story of Benjamin Rask who sells the tobacco empire built by his forebears, particularly his father Solomon, and buys into the financial industry. He becomes a huge success.

- He successfully navigates the 1920 recession, then the bull market of the 1920s, then the crash of October 1929. The bubble became a slump, then a panic. ‘In the general desolation, amidst the rubble, Rask was the only man standing…He had shorted, quite spectacularly, the ensuing crash’. He became a scapegoat, the popular press blaming him for the economic disaster. He made some badly wrong decisions later in the decade and faded from public view.

- The second part of Diaz's novel gives us a draft memoir titled My Life, by an Andrew Bevel, a highly influential financial player in New York who accuses Harold Vanner of basing his novel on him and his wife Mildred. He is determined to demolish the novel's 'libellous trash'. 

- His draft memoir demonstrates what an insufferable, self-entitled prick he actually is. His great grandfather William ‘was an innovator and a visionary…His experiments with currencies, with futures contracts, with treasury notes…show his pioneering spirit’. Andrew is continuing that noble tradition. ‘I’m essential to society and its economy’ he claims. ‘Personal gain ought to be a public asset’. He smugly narrates his ‘success’ in saving and building the nation’s economy in the 1920s...'Nothing to do with the government...My actions safeguarded American industry and business'. 

- He describes the phenomenal post World War 1 economic growth - electricity, motor cars and trucks, highways, home appliances, etc. ‘But the greatest American industry at that time was finance’. 

- He is excruciatingly sexist. Women just 'interfere' if they’re not busy with housework. And he hates the 'interfering' Federal Reserve. 

- Mildred, however, his wife, is really a fascinating character. She is a philanthropist and a very generous patron of the arts, particularly New York orchestras and musicians. She enabled the birth of the Juilliard Graduate School. She actually detests her husband's primitive, ugly views, and they never talk when home, only at public events. 

- The most fascinating memoir is by a young woman Ida Partenza, who is hired by Bevel to transcribe, edit and type his memoir. She is a creative ghostwriter. She visits Bevel House regularly for this purpose. Her father is an Italian immigrant and a radical anarchist, opposite in every way to the New York elite establishment his daughter now works for. They argue a lot, and it's delightful. Fascism is building in Europe and capitalism is raging out of control in America.   

- She delves into Mildred’s diaries to explore her social life in detail. Mildred welcomes many famous composers and musicians to the mansion, including Ravel, Stravinski and Respighi. She generously funded contemporary composers, whom she preferred, and hosted concerts. Bevel hated these ‘untraditional’ performances that ‘barely sounded like music’. Ida however uncovers a far more sophisticated woman, not the childlike, homey, invention of her husband. Mildred also becomes interested in politics and current affairs. This is quite different from Vanner’s version of her as the quiet aesthete slowly going insane. ‘Why make her mad when she was obviously so lucid?, Ida reflects. 

- Any decent husband would be impressed by his wife’s gifts and achievements, but not Bevel, this cold money obsessed knob. Thankfully he dies soon after of a heart attack.

- The fourth part of the novel is titled Futures. It's Mildred's journal, one she kept as a patient in an institution caring for cancer sufferers. Ida discovers it in the New York Public Library 50 years later. 

- What becomes clear, and is absolutely revelatory given the creative fictions we've been fed so far, is that she was very much involved in her husband's financial decisions. She was a 'mathematical genius'. They were a partnership. ‘He taught me the rules of investment. I showed him how to think beyond their boundaries….Andrew followed my instructions. Our profits during those years dwarfed the original Bevel fortune’. At one point she whimsically suggested bribing one of the keyboard operators at the stock exchange to provide all the quotes before punching them into the ticker machine thus making them public. They would have ten seconds at least to buy or sell. He acted on that advice and made huge gains. She was appalled and labeled him a criminal.

- She had an extraordinary gift of correctly predicting market trends. In September 1929, for instance, one month before the great crash, she and her husband liquidated and made a fortune.

- So Diaz has given us a novella of fiction and three books of memoir, all in various ways undermining each other. Mildred however emerges as the reliable narrator, and Ida the honest biographer. They are the voices we learn to trust. 

- Females, finance, a century ago. Who would have thought!