Like four exquisite dioramas, Diaz has set up all of these stories with great precision to present two fundamental questions: Why do we tell stories? And at what cost are those stories told? The stories in question revolve around finance, power, and identity, are all self-serving, and are about much more than what one person does to another.
Put her in her place.”Įverything in “Trust” is in its place. He forced her into the stereotype of fated heroines throughout history, made to offer the spectacle of their own ruin. As she begins casting Andrew’s memoir in the image of his creation, Ida wonders why the author of “Bonds” would subject her to this fate: “I always came back to the same conclusion: he broke her mind and body simply because it made for a better story. What bothers Andrew Bevel most about “Bonds” is how its author portrays the wife, who dies, as Mildred Bevel did, in a Swiss sanatorium (even though Andrew had always insisted her illness was cancer, not madness). Through a familiar cast of characters - unapologetic financiers bending markets and people to their wills a justifiably disillusioned immigrant marginalized women - Diaz’s plot is revealed by four stories that continually raise questions about what can and cannot be believed. Of course, this is all fiction, and Diaz has given us a thoroughly literary novel. You also have a penchant for storytelling that may come in handy.” Like the New Yorker editor, very few people know, due to her having signed a confidentiality agreement, that Ida’s career path was inextricably linked to the fact that decades earlier, Andrew had hired her as his secretary, with a very specific project in mind: “I shall speak you will take dictation. The assignment in question was offered in 1981, on the occasion of the opening of the Bevel House, a new addition to Manhattan’s Museum Mile that celebrates the business acumen of Andrew Bevel and the philanthropic legacy of Andrew and his wife, Mildred. Ida, the Brooklyn-born daughter of an Italian activist, is 70 years old when she begins telling her story it is nearing the end of the 20th century, and she is a writer, successful enough to turn down an assignment from The New Yorker.
It takes about 200 pages before readers meet Ida Partenza in Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust,” a fragmentary novel told across four interlocking fictional books: “Bonds” by Harold Vanner “My Life” by Andrew Bevel “A Memoir, Remembered” by Ida and “Futures” by Mildred Bevel.
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