Hernan Diaz’s second novel, Trust, is a collection of four manuscripts at different stages of completion, and they tell different versions of the story of a Wall Street businessman and his wife in the years leading up to the Great Depression. In Bonds, ostensibly a bestselling novel authored by one Harold Vanner, a monkish mogul manages to make a massive windfall during the 1929 stock market crash while his wife tragically succumbs to mental illness far away in Switzerland. My Life is the partial autobiography of Andrew Bevel, clearly the model for the tycoon in Bonds, strewn with half-finished chapters and paragraph outlines. The first few pages of Futures, the scribbled diaries of Andrew’s wife, Mildred, have been randomly ripped out. The Bevels’ competing narratives are mediated by a long postmortem memoir, written by Ida Partenza, once the gullible ghostwriter of Andrew’s book.
The novel’s Rashomon-like structure is buttressed by Diaz’s astute grasp of the ways in which we reliably deceive ourselves, which in turn is compounded by the book’s central obsession: the creepy similarities between the worlds of fiction and finance. Even the manuscript titles feel like lexical interventions. Bonds could refer to either monetary instruments or familial attachments; a future is both a preemptive financial contract and something that “tries… to become the past”. When Ida was growing up in Brooklyn, her single father, a proud anarchist, would often point to the imposing Manhattan skyline across the river and insist that it was all a dream. “Money. What is money?” he would mutter to himself. “Commodities in a purely fantastic form.”
