Trust

December 1, 2021

A Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner finalist for In the Distance, Diaz uses a multilayered narrative to investigate money and power, truth and perception, and early 20th-century U.S. history. In 1920s New York, Wall Street tycoon Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen, of offbeat aristocratic origins, are the cr�me of society's cr�me. They're also the protagonists of the novel Bonds, published in 1938 and on everyone's reading list. But the novel doesn't reveal the whole truth about the characters, who here engage with other accounts to share the big picture. I've heard raves.

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Starred review from February 28, 2022
Diaz returns after his Pulitzer finalist In the Distance with a wondrous portrait in four texts of devious financier Andrew Bevel, who survives the Wall Street crash of 1929 and becomes one of New York City’s chief financial barons before dying a decade later at age 62. First there is Bonds, a novel by controversial writer Harold Vanner, which tells the story of Benjamin Rask, a character clearly based on Bevel. The novel, published shortly before Bevel’s death, infuriates the magnate, particularly for its depiction of Bevel’s deceased wife, Mildred, as a fragile madwoman. Bevel responds by undertaking a memoir, which only serves to highlight his own touchiness and lack of imagination. The third story-within-the-story is the most significant; in it, the reader meets Ida Partenza, daughter of an Italian anarchist in exile, who, in pursuit of her own writerly ambitions, suppresses both her own conscience and the suspicions of her suitor, Jack, to become Bevel’s secretary and coconspirator in ruining Harold Vanner, as Ida concocts a counternarrative of a saintly Mildred. The reader eventually hears from Mildred directly via her journal, discovered by Ida during her research and included as a coda. The result is a kaleidoscope of capitalism run amok in the early 20th century, which also manages to deliver a biography of its irascible antihero and the many lives he disfigures during his rise to the cream of the city’s crop. Grounded in history and formally ambitious, this succeeds on all fronts. Once again, Diaz makes the most of his formidable gifts.

April 1, 2022
Pulitzer Prize finalist Diaz (In the Distance, 2017), returns with a multilayered novel that pieces together a searing portrait of a New York financial elite during the early-twentieth-century world through four discrete documents. The first is a novel written by Harold Vanner about the reluctant scion of a tobacco empire, Benjamin Rask, ""an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover."" The second is a partial memoir written by Andrew Bevel, a New York financier with a clear resemblance to the character in Vanner's novel, who seeks retribution for Vanner's fictionalization of his life. The third piece presents the memoirs of Ida Partenze, a journalist turned accomplice to Bevel's ambitions to ruin Vanner, who also seeks to undermine Bevel's marriage. The final section delivers the journal entries of Mildred, Bevel's wife, adding yet another facet to the stories-within-stories. For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz's novel is compulsively readable, and despite taking place in the early 1900s, the plot reads like an indictment of the start of the twenty-first century with its obsession with obscure financial instruments and unhinged capital accumulation. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance.

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April 1, 2022

After debuting with the epic Pulitzer Prize finalist novel In the Distance, Diaz returns with pokes at the boundaries of fiction. It's made of four "subworks" in various states of completion that together shape the tale of a fictional American oligarch, Andrew Bevel, whose skilled stock market manipulations may have caused the Twenties boom and subsequent Great Depression. The first work is a short novel, a fictionalized take of Bevel's success and his wife's loss of her grip on reality. The second is ostensibly Bevel's unfinished autobiography, which he wrote to correct supposed errors in the novel. Actually, it's written by a ghostwriter, Ida Partenza, whose memoir forms the third work. Last is a memoir fragment by Bevel's dying wife. VERDICT Both historical and postmodern, this novel gives readers the task of interpreting its multiple parts and narrators, making it an intriguing, stimulating read. Throughout, Diaz's stirring prose and unforgettable imagery shine through, notably in his poetic descriptions of high finance. He also holds a mirror up to the oligarchs of our own era, reflecting their greed and fragile egos. Highly recommended.--Reba Leiding

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Starred review from March 1, 2022
A tale of wealth, love, and madness told in four distinct but connected narratives. Pulitzer finalist Diaz's ingenious second novel--following In the Distance (2017)--opens with the text of Bonds, a Wharton-esque novel by Harold Vanner that tells the story of a reclusive man who finds his calling and a massive fortune in the stock market in the early 20th century. But the comforts of being one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.--even after the 1929 crash--are undone by the mental decline of his wife. Bonds is followed by the unfinished text of a memoir by Andrew Bevel, a famously successful New York investor whose life echoes many of the incidents in Vanner's novel. Two more documents--a memoir by Ida Partenza, an accomplished magazine writer, and a diary by Mildred, Bevel's brilliant wife--serve to explain those echoes. Structurally, Diaz's novel is a feat of literary gamesmanship in the tradition of David Mitchell or Richard Powers. Diaz has a fine ear for the differing styles each type of document requires: Bonds is engrossing but has a touch of the fusty, dialogue-free fiction of a century past, and Ida is a keen, Lillian Ross-type observer. But more than simply succeeding at its genre exercises, the novel brilliantly weaves its multiple perspectives to create a symphony of emotional effects; what's underplayed by Harold is thundered by Andrew, provided nuance by Ida, and given a plot twist by Mildred. So the novel overall feels complex but never convoluted, focused throughout on the dissatisfactions of wealth and the suppression of information for the sake of keeping up appearances. No one document tells the whole story, but the collection of palimpsests makes for a thrilling experience and a testament to the power and danger of the truth--or a version of it--when it's set down in print. A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.

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