Trust
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

The novel Trust by Hernan Diaz is made up of four parts. The best part is the first part, the part called Bonds. It is reminiscent of the writing of Henry James and Edith Wharton. It’s a novel about a wealthy and powerful financier named Benjamin Rask and his ailing wife. It is supposedly a fictional account of the life of a man named Andrew Bevel, written by a writer named Harold Vanner. (You understand, don’t you, that none of these people are real people but are fictional constructs?)

The second part of the book is My Life and is supposedly written by the real Andrew Bevel. It’s supposed to “set the record straight” after the novel Bonds was released and became fairly popular. It isn’t nearly as interesting or as much fun to read as Bonds.

It isn’t until the third part of Trust that we learn how the four parts are interconnected. The third part is A Memoir, Remembered, supposedly written by a woman named Ida Partenza (again, a fictional construct created of Hernan Diaz). Ida Partenza is about twenty-one. She lives with her father, a radical Socialist, in the Bronx. When she applies for a secretarial job at a financial firm in Manhattan, she catches the eye of the wealthy financier Andrew Bevel. He likes her answers on tests she’s given, and he chooses her to write his story, to set the record straight about his life after the novel Bonds, which he believes to be all scurrilous lies. The new job is more than Ida expected and the pay is good. She hopes her new employer doesn’t find out that her father is a radical.

Andrew Bevel particularly wants Ida Partenza to clear up misconceptions about his late wife, who has died of cancer. In the book Bonds, you see, his wife was portrayed as a mental a patient who died from radical treatment in a sanitorium in Switzerland. Andrew Bevel doesn’t like that his wife, who was a socialite and a philanthropist, is portrayed as a mental patient.

Ida Partenza spends many hours with Andrew Bevel talking about his life. (And, no, there is no hint of a romance between them; he’s in his early sixties.) Ida discovers that, in her talks with Andrew Bevel, he marginalizes and misrepresents his late wife. He seems to want to prevent the world from knowing what his wife was really like. Exactly what is he trying to hide?

A Memoir, Remembered is the longest of the four parts of Trust. There’s so much back and forth between Ida Partenza and Andrew Bevel, and it goes on for so long that we end up not caring one way or the other. The better Ida Partenza comes to know Andrew Bevel, the more she fears and mistrusts him and realizes that he’s doing his late wife a disservice. Ho-hum.

The fourth and last “book” of the novel is called Futures, and it’s supposedly written by Mildred Bevel herself, the ailing wife of Andrew Bevel and is told in her first-person voice. It’s mercifully short and doesn’t add much to what has gone before. It’s mostly details about Mildred’s illness and her strange relationship with her odd husband. What fun.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp