Four ways of looking at a Wall Street tycoon

Hernan Diaz’s new novel, 'Trust', is not just about those who accumulate capital. It also deals with authenticity, representation, and different ways of mapping the same territory. (Representational image: Lolo via Unsplash)

Given the financialisation of everything, it’s a pity that only a few recent novels have been about the makers of money. There are some notable exceptions. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities sent up the narcissism of 1980s Wall Street traders; Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic showed how the downturn of the 2000s affected smaller communities; and Don deLillo’s Cosmopolis captured the predatory world of brash asset managers.

Into this uncrowded field steps Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust. Fittingly enough for an author who has earlier written about Jorge Luis Borges, it is not just about those who accumulate capital. It also deals with authenticity, representation, and different ways of mapping the same territory.

The table of contents is the key to this novel’s scheme. There are four parts to the book: a fictional author’s novella, the draft of an autobiography, a memoir, and finally, a series of diary entries.

This description makes it sound as though Trust is intricate and difficult to follow. Far from it. Diaz skilfully handles these portrayals to uncover, layer by layer, the enigma at the centre of a powerful Citizen Kane-like character who seeks to control how his legacy is viewed by the world.

All the narratives centre on facets of the rise of this plutocrat. To stick with the bare bones: he was born into a family that made its fortune from tobacco and came of age in the early years of the twentieth century without much hardship. As we’re told at the beginning, his was not “the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross”.

Soon, his elegant, systematic approach to Wall Street trading and consistent earnings bring him to everyone’s notice, even as he shuns the limelight. The 1929 crash does little to deplete his riches but the repercussions of this event, along with the sickness and untimely death of his wife, make him retreat further from the public eye.

The opening novella presents one version of these events. The following autobiographical draft is a record by the tycoon himself, after which is a reminiscence by his secretary, to whom the autobiography was dictated. At the heart of it all are the final diary entries by his wife, who has particular skills of her own.

Diaz handles these varying registers with admirable control. He twists the kaleidoscope with each version, rearranging elements to form new realities. This isn’t exactly a Rashomon-like retelling of a single incident; rather, it deal with how facts can be shaped or suppressed to suit vested interests. In an apt play on words, one section is called “Bonds” and another, “Futures”, apart from the title itself.

Trust also features characters not from a world of capitalist accumulation. The secretary’s father, for instance, is an impecunious Italian-American anarchist who functions as an obvious but necessary counterpoint to the magnate.

Early on, he traces the outline of the Manhattan skyline with his finger and tells his daughter that despite all that steel and concrete, Wall Street is merely a fiction. Years later, the tycoon tells her that if he is ever wrong, he must “make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake”.

The novel doesn’t set out to reference Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is based in the same era, but resonances do emerge. When the secretary sticks her nose into an envelope containing her first salary, she is struck by a forest-like scent, “as if the bills were the product of nature”. One can’t help but think of Daisy bending her head and sobbing into the “soft, rich heap” of Gatsby’s shirts, and his later remark that her voice is “full of money”.

Diaz’s novel ends with revelations that make the secrets behind the tycoon’s wealth and the role of his wife crystal clear. Some more ambivalence would have been in keeping with the smoke and mirrors of preceding sections. That notwithstanding, Trust is an impressive procession of portrayals of reality. In the words that Borges once used to describe the nature of a book, it is an “axis of innumerable narrations”.