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Review: Hernan Diaz’s jigsaw-puzzle novel aims to debunk American myths

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Andrew Bevel, the elusive Manhattan financier at the center of Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust ,” is all story, no substance. A 6-feet-tall stack of $100 bills dressed in a Savile Row suit, Bevel’s only notable trait is that he’s a schmuck.

Nonetheless, Bevel’s name is engraved in stone on New York institutions and pressed onto the front pages of newspapers. His whims flip the markets, demolish industries, control the livelihoods of every creature in this country. He claims in his autobiography, “My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few,” but that implies there is a life to know. As one character explains, “[H]e had no appetites to repress.”

Then again, that’s the point of him. The hollow core of the great man myth is Diaz’s recurring project. He specializes in plaster busts that look like marble only from a distance.

In his first novel, the nearly perfect “ In the Distance ,” Diaz created the un-Bevel in a mid-19th century Swedish immigrant named Håkan, a man of enormous physical stature and dejected humility who accidentally turns himself into a folk hero. History has tricked us into revering these men, Diaz suggests, so he will too. His new entry in that project, “Trust,” is a wily jackalope of a novel — tame but prickly, a different beast from every angle.

If you can keep this straight, “Trust” has four parts inside it: a novel within the novel followed by an autobiography in progress followed by a memoir and finally a primary source. The novel, “Bonds,” by a chap called Harold Vanner, is the tale of Benjamin and Helen Rask — thinly disguised stand-ins for Bevel and his wife, Mildred — early 20th century Manhattan bigwigs who grow richer and more reclusive in tandem until Helen dies, mad and logorrheic, in a Swiss sanatorium. Succès de scandale .

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The autobiography, “My Life,” is Bevel’s attempt at a refutation: Vanner, he insists, wrongly skewered him as the proximate cause of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and misrepresented his sweet, simple wife as a gilded-caged Bertha Mason . It’s less mea culpa , more me me me .

Just as Bevel’s autobiography retells the story of the novel, the memoir guts the autobiography like a still-wriggling fish. The author of “A Memoir, Remembered” is a striving first-generation Italian American woman named Ida Partenza (alias Ida Prentice, get it, apprentice ?) who seems to have the real truth in her grasp. Until that changes. I won’t reveal the contents of the final section; that would unravel Diaz’s careful cross-stitch. But let’s just say it too undoes what came before.

Readers either adore or abhor trickster novels. Think of how Ian McEwan’s “ Atonement ” and Susan Choi’s “ Trust Exercise ” evoke such vehement reactions depending on the reader’s tolerance for high jinks. Both, in my estimation, are hands-down successes: Their twists fulfill a compact with the reader.

Diaz, on the other hand, undercuts himself. I’m delighted that he messes with narrative: By all means, mash fiction into sludge and refire it into something new. But if everything is a ruse — and absolutely every bit of “Trust” betrays its title — the reveal has to live up to the subterfuge. Diaz’s revelation will wallop you with its obviousness. It’s a trick that women perfected in decades long gone.

I mean this, in a way, as a backward compliment: The disappointment is intense because the setup is so shrewd and the writing so immaculate. “Trust” mimics narrative conventions so masterfully that Diaz can smuggle in an entire story without attracting attention. As with “ Chicago’s ” slippery Billy Flynn, “You notice how his mouth never moves.”

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It starts with a literary honey trap: Vanner’s novel about the Rasks is the sort of faux-Whartonian confection that relies heavily on descriptions of polished wood and unpolished manners: snobbery and snubbery. Buttercream fiction — too rich in every way. I’m embarrassed to admit it checked all my boxes: hushed mansions, gilded cages and sanatorium scenes lifted right out of “The Magic Mountain.”

Bevel’s staid and self-deluded “My Life” (a Bill Clinton jab , one can only hope) follows every tired convention of the windy autobiographies of tycoons and other rich twits. It’s scoldy: “I hope my words will steel the reader against not only the regrettable conditions of our time but also against any form of coddling.” It’s also entirely belittling of his partner: Mildred is a “quiet, steady presence … placid moral example … like a sweetly mischievous child.” But it parcels out just enough facts divergent from “Bonds” — Helen Rask dies when her heart gives out after experimental “Convulsive Therapy,” Mildred Bevel of a cruel tumor — to invite more interest in Bevel, not less.

Ida’s memoir, set in 1938 and “written” in 1981, promises the clarity of a third party. More specifically, a female third party, unyoked from ego. In Italian, al punto di partenza means to come full circle, and Miss Partenza, with her insights into Bevel, tries to close the loop on his life. It’s no accident that her own story — raised by an anarchist father who, significantly, runs a printing press (every major character is devoted to the written word) — proves more alluring than a mogul’s. She is the kind of person — poor, self-taught, female — so often overshadowed by the great men of history. Bevel underestimates her, and Mildred, at his peril.

And in this house of blind spots, what is Diaz’s? He underestimates how many times we’ve seen this story before and how little it will surprise readers to discover that a woman is smarter and more complicated than men present her to be. We cannot keep locking madwomen in the attic just so we can free them to cheers and sighs of relief.

Diaz’s ending presumes to get at the root of something: “Trust” takes an obvious fiction and sheds more and more pretense as it goes along. It even begins with a bound and sold book and ends with a secret, illegible one, as if authenticity can flow only from the nib of a pen. But “Trust” spoofs so much that it winds up spoofing itself. Novels must tell a truth, even when they don’t tell the truth.

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Kelly’s work has been published in New York magazine, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

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Hardeep sidhu, more online by hardeep sidhu.

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by Hernan Diaz

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Hernan Diaz’s Trust , like his Pulitzer-finalist debut In the Distance (2017), is historical fiction that thrums with the energy of today’s crises. Diaz trains his eye on the wealthy New Yorkers of the Great Depression to tell a story of our time: capital’s inexorable march in the face of economic crisis. But Diaz avoids allegory in favor of enduring questions. Who holds wealth, and why? And how does capital—like a “living creature [ … ] following appetites of its own [ … ] trying to exercise its free will”—shape the stories we tell?

Trust revolves around a secretive wealthy couple, the Rasks. Benjamin has new money, Helen an old name. Their fortune grows in spite of—or perhaps because of—the 1929 stock market crash. An enraged public views Benjamin as “the hand behind the invisible hand.” The press depicts him as “a vampire, a vulture, or a pig.” Helen, insulated until now by her philanthropy, sees that “she would pay for the suffering that had helped make her husband rich beyond measure.” As the Rasks amass greater wealth, their private lives fall apart.

Stories about the Rasks proliferate, each of which Diaz captures through a kaleidoscopic structure. Trust consists of four sections: a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a private diary, each with its own author, audience, and agenda. The story unfolds in the interplay between these texts as much as within them.

I confess that the novel-within-a-novel conceit is a pet peeve of mine. All too often the embedded stories aren’t as good as their frames require them to be. But Bonds , the opening political novel-within-a-novel by the fictitious Harold Vanner, succeeds on its own terms before Diaz puts it to other uses. Matching the era’s writing, Vanner’s immersive novel evokes Edith Wharton’s perceptive eye and the muckrakers’ moral intensity. Finely sketched details accrete into compelling portraits. And the plot—a political fable about a capitalist’s hubris—builds steadily to a dramatic conclusion. And then Diaz starts the story over.

Like any good experimental novel, Trust —a clean, linear narrative until this point—shatters to fragments. And, as with any good detective novel, the reader must parse contradictory accounts, dodge red herrings, and hunt for clues to find the answers. For all his deep fascination with political economy, Diaz has written a well-paced, suspenseful novel. As readers, we end up trying to pin down the well-guarded secrets of society’s elite.

Subsequent sections reveal Benjamin and Helen Rask to be Andrew and Mildred Bevel, who write their own separate accounts to set the record straight. The novel’s longest section, and its heart, is a memoir by one Ida Partenza, a self-taught typist and daughter of an Italian anarchist, who comes to work for Andrew Bevel. Ida’s proletarian presence bursts the elite bubble we’ve only peered into until now. Soon, questions of complicity arise. Is there dignity in her work on behalf of capital? Or is her labor a betrayal in itself? The vivid meetings of Ida and Andrew remind me of Roberto Bolaño’s Father Urrutia, tasked with teaching Marxism to Pinochet. The power imbalances of a fractured society are embodied and dramatized in tense scenes. “‘Have your chowder,’” Andrew commands her during a fraught dinner conversation. “I had my chowder,” Ida recalls, without comment.

One of the novel’s preoccupations is misogyny, which cuts across political lines. Women hide their opinions from self-absorbed men. Such men, writes Ida, “all believed, without any sort of doubt, that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard.” The novel’s conservative men, of course, uphold the gender status quo. But the anti-capitalist and anarchist men of Trust , for all their critiques of self-interest and hierarchy, are complicit. Ida’s self-assured writing throws the gender politics of the novel into stark relief. And, in a bravura final section, Mildred Bevel—a fleeting, feminine presence in the men’s stories—finally has her say.

This intricate novel possesses a rare, fractal beauty: patterns first noticeable in the tiny twigs of its sentences recur in the branches of its sections and yet again in the shape of the whole. One character in Trust calls money a fiction. Finance capital, then, is “the fiction of a fiction.” And Trust , you might say, is the fiction of the fiction of a fiction, whose patterns extend well beyond its pages. Human lives rise and fall, but the greed of corporations and family fortunes persists. “Self-made” men trade on the stolen labor of women and the underclass. And the wealthy will stop at nothing—they will even “bend and align reality” itself—to tell their story in their own way. But, as Trust shows, theirs must not be the last word.

Published on August 9, 2022

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Hernan Diaz’s Trust Is a Buzzy, Enthralling Tour de Force and Winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize

Among Diaz’s literary influences are Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Karl Marx.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead wrong when he quipped that there are no second acts in American lives; as Hernan Diaz probes in Trust , his enthralling tour de force, there are at least four wildly disparate perspectives on the rich and infamous. He transports readers back to the Roaring Twenties and subsequent Depression, when our collective labors bore rotten fruit, seeding disparities that are still with us. He structures Trust around a childless, affluent Manhattan couple, Andrew and Mildred Bevel, in a quartet of narratives that open up like Matryoshka dolls: a novel, a partial memoir, a memoir of that memoir, and a journal. Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory. Free markets are never free, as he suggests; our desire to punish often trumps our generous impulses. As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money.

Published in 2017, Diaz’s debut, In the Distance , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some. A finance titan in the early 20th century, Bevel has built spectacularly on fortunes amassed by his forebears. His biography is loosely re-created as fiction in Trust ’s first act, “Bonds,” a thinly veiled novel written by one Harold Vanner, a hanger-on who chronicles the myth of Benjamin and Helen Rask, also a childless, affluent Manhattan couple: their opulent Fifth Avenue mansion, the shady deals that buoy them through the 1929 crash, and Helen’s fatal illness, which ends tragically in a Swiss sanatorium. Diaz’s ventriloquism here is stellar: As Venner, he channels Edith Wharton in an arch yet irresistible voice.

“And so it was that Helen, after each sleepless night spent talking to silent snooded nurses, was taken out into the garden with the first light and left alone on a chaise facing the mountains. She continued with her soliloquy while freeing herself from under the tightly tucked blankets. As the sun rose, however, her monologue declined into sporadic mutterings, which, in turn, melted in silence. For an hour or so, she would enjoy the bliss of impersonality—of becoming pure perception, of existing only as that which saw the mountaintop, heard the bell, smelled the air.”

Wordplay is Trust’s currency: The title refers not only to financial trusts but also the trust we place in each other, the contract between reader and author. As Vanner writes of Rask, “He created a trust meant exclusively for the working man. A small amount, the few hundred dollars in a modest savings account, was enough to get started.… A schoolteacher or farmer could then settle her or his debt in comfortable monthly payments.” But the social bonds in “Bonds” fray like a tattered rug. Just before the crash, Rask, sensing catastrophe, opts to make a buck at the expense of those at the bottom of the economic ladder: “He even divested from all his trusts, including the one he had designed for the working man.”

In Trust ’s second section, Bevel speaks for himself. Incensed by the publication of “Bonds” in 1938, following the death of his beloved Mildred, he’s determined to set the record straight. “My Life” is an incomplete memoir, but it defiantly affirms the WASP aristocracy as Bevel recalls the past generations of his family—their genius for business, their Hudson Valley estates and European sojourns. He leaves gaps in each chapter, where Diaz romps playfully, allowing the reader to glimpse another story nestled among white space. The Wall Street tycoon may bristle at an arriviste like Vanner, but each wave of the super-rich seeks to displace the established order, as Bevel’s note to himself indicates: “More details on transaction and personal meaning of taking over Vanderbilt house.”

Bevel casts himself in the best possible light, but Diaz gleefully exposes him as a priggish narcissist, a Jazz Age Koch brother. The entry titled “Apprenticeship” is left blank—he likes to present himself as a hard-working self-made man, a prodigy, when in fact he's inherited his fortune . He jots down terse fragments as placeholders in his manuscript: “Panic as an opportunity for forging new relationships” and “Short, dignified account of Mildred’s rapid deterioration.” Sometimes he breaks off mid-sentence.

Trust’s tricks propel the novel’s third section, told by Ida Partenza, an elderly literary journalist who, in her own memoir, reflects on the genesis of her career, when Bevel hired her as a secretary to shape his manuscript. She’s kept the secrets of her employment through the decades. In the 1980s, she learns that Andrew and Mildred’s personal papers have been archived in their former Upper East Side mansion, now a Frick-like museum. Her curiosity gets the better of her: Do their narratives differ from hers? Today Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood may be a gentrified, sought-after address, but in 1938 it was a working-class Italian enclave, bustling with bars and butcher shops, sailors and typesetters, like Ida’s immigrant father, a Marxist who shakes his fist at the Manhattan skyline across the East River. Her visit to the Bevel museum ushers us back into an America mired in economic woes, with World War II on the horizon.

During her time with Bevel, rendered in flashback, Ida marvels at the financier’s arrogance and self-delusion: “It was also of great importance to him to show the many ways in which his investments had always accompanied and indeed promoted the country’s growth.… While geared toward profit, his actions had invariably had the nation’s best interest at heart. Business was a form of patriotism.” Although Ida is from the wrong borough, Bevel respects her talent and candor. The mysteries mount as she recounts her boss’s lies; he’s borrowed a few details from her life to flesh out his own. For her, the act of memory is a vendetta.

In Diaz’s accomplished hands we circle ever closer to the black hole at the core of Trust. Mildred’s journal, “Futures,” squeezes the gravity from what’s come before, a dizzying crescendo and the novel’s most intimate section. Mildred doesn’t have a future, but she’s very keen on recording the past and present. Bevel is capable of tenderness, as when he organizes a surprise picnic for his spouse—“overstaffed + overfurnished,” she notes wryly. “He was uncomfortable. Kept looking at the sun filtering through the twiggery as if affronted by it. Smacking non-existent bugs on his face. But kindly looked after me.”

Which narrator do we trust? One or more, all, none?

Diaz owes debts to a range of influences, from Woolf and Wharton to thinkers such as Marx and Milton Friedman. Trust is a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery. It’s also a window onto Diaz’s method. Ida recalls the detective fiction she adored in her youth, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers: “These women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world.… They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: The reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted.”

He spins a larger parable, then, plumbing sex and power, causation and complicity. Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read. Or as Mildred writes in her journal, “a song played in reverse and on its head.”

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Can a Novel Capture the Power of Money?

Readers of fiction often ask to be transported. To be “moved” is the great passive verb of experiencing art: we are absorbed, we are overtaken. If we take the phrase at face value, we are most excited when we are least participants—when we surrender to the power of an art work, trusting the artist, or even that greater and more nebulous power we call “the story,” to take us somewhere we could not have foreseen.

Markets move, too, through a force we don’t quite understand. Though Adam Smith rarely used the phrase in his writings, his metaphor of the invisible hand has—true to the image—gradually taken on a life of its own. The idea that the market has an independent power, directing itself better than any individual could, dominated the twentieth century, and grew especially pronounced after the Second World War, as the gospel of deregulation swept across the globe. As Ronald Reagan put it, “the magic of the marketplace” was at work. And yet the invisible hand appears only once in Smith’s landmark work, “ The Wealth of Nations ,” as part of a withering assessment of good intentions. The true capitalist, Smith writes,

intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

Even if an investor wanted to improve society, Smith argues, his bright ideas would be less effective than the aggregate flows of supply and demand. Money moves in mysterious ways, and regardless of whether the effects are harmonious, or simply random, they’re felt in daily life: a good deal on a mortgage one year might mean foreclosure the next. This impersonal force can feel like a god to whose whims we are subject. Maybe even like an author moving characters across the page.

In one sense, money has always powered the novel. Plot is derived from loss and gain, whether it’s the passive income of a Jane Austen suitor or the grinding poverty depicted in Knut Hamsun’s “ Hunger .” But as money became a global system—a vast web of transactions, fascinating precisely because it has no signature image, no physical presence—the task of portraying it became trickier. The large banks and mythic financiers of the nineteenth century were useful symbols, dramatized in novels by Dickens, Balzac, and Zola. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, global finance lodged itself permanently in the public imagination, and novelists tried once more to capture its bland totality. Zia Haider Rahman’s “ In the Light of What We Know ,” about a banker who observes a classmate straying dangerously from the path of prosperity, linked the shadowy world of finance to the war on terror. John Lanchester’s “ Capital ” studied a street of London houses—the literal capital of the row’s inhabitants—to chart a constellation of urban lives. For the most part, though, markets elude the grasp of representation. How can a novel capture this opaque, all-powerful, and essential force?

In “ Trust ,” Hernan Diaz takes a unique approach to the problem. The book—which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and will soon be adapted into a TV series starring Kate Winslet—manipulates the machinery of story itself, presenting four narratives that interlock like nesting boxes. Diaz’s title hints at his intentions: in financial terms, a trust is an arrangement that allows a third party to hold assets for a beneficiary. (A bank, for example, might manage an inheritance until the inheritor reaches a certain age.) This, of course, requires a belief that the bank is a stable, even benevolent institution. Diaz’s novel suggests that a similar compact sustains the world of narrative. A story, like a dollar bill, can do its work only when we accept its value, when we know that we’re in safe hands. Once we question it, things get more complicated.

“Trust” begins with a novel-within-a-novel: a book by a writer named Harold Vanner called “Bonds.” It tells the story of Benjamin Rask, a scion of an New York, Gilded Age family, who has “enjoyed almost every advantage since birth.” Rask is a restless youth, indifferent to high-society luxury; nothing seems to interest him until he discovers the magic of the stock market. Transfixed by the ticker-tape feed, he transforms his inheritance into a financial juggernaut, a firm trading in “gold and guano, in currencies and cotton, in bonds and beef.”

Rask is a taciturn character, stripped of personality and defined largely in the negative: he is “an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover.” Even his interest in money is somewhat abstract. But this blank, sterile quality reflects his vocation, an inscrutable trade that remains almost monstrously real:

If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details.

A fortune comes easily to Rask; the question is what to do with it. In classic novelistic fashion, he decides to find a wife. Enter Helen Brevoort, the only daughter of a hard-up but respectable family, and a mathematics prodigy who performs in the expatriate salons of Europe. Helen and Benjamin marry, but Helen can’t reciprocate Benjamin’s love—there is always a chilly “distance” between them. Her talents and imagination are neutralized, then funnelled into philanthropy, the classic pressure valve of capital accumulation. When Benjamin achieves even more staggering profits by shorting the crash of 1929, the Rasks become social pariahs, and Helen slips into a mysterious illness. As the story comes to a tragic close, the reader looks up to discover that they’re only a quarter of the way through the novel.

Diaz is an author who confidently, often gleefully, rejects literary trends. His first novel, “ In the Distance ” (2017), was published when he was in his mid-forties, working as a scholar at Columbia; the manuscript was plucked out of a slush pile and went on to receive a Pulitzer nomination. The book is an offbeat Western whose protagonist, a hulking Swede named Håkan, boards the wrong boat—to San Francisco instead of New York City. He spends the rest of the story travelling not west but east, in order to find his brother. The standard tropes are there, from devious gold prospectors to endless wagon trains, but the form is scrambled; Diaz triggers the pleasure of recognition without collapsing into cliché. He creates a rich odyssey of American weirdness: turn the page, and a new mad scientist or religious cult might appear.

Diaz doesn’t endow Håkan with much interiority; we rarely get access to his thoughts, and his conversations are stymied by the language barrier—a clever twist on the strong, silent type. Similarly, “Bonds,” the novel-within-a-novel, has no dialogue from its characters, and so can feel like a summary, an outline awaiting further development. But this text is just the first piece of the puzzle. The next section is a manuscript entitled “My Life,” by someone named Andrew Bevel. Narrated in the first person, Bevel’s life clearly resembles Rask’s—he’s a rich New York financier who profited from the crash and whose wife died from an illness—but the details start to blur and diverge. More strangely, a curious unevenness begins to surface in the text, as if the writing were giving notes to itself:

More examples of his business acumen. Show his pioneering spirit. […] More about mother.

There is something deft and quite funny about this maneuver—in peeking into the unfinished manuscript of a vain billionaire’s memoir, one feels a surprising intimacy, even as you learn the shortcomings of the subject’s imagination. It’s clear that Bevel’s “Life” exists to correct his fictionalization in “Bonds,” which portrays him as callous, at best, and at worst coldly villainous toward his wife. Unfortunately, Bevel can’t quite seem to muster evidence for his compassion: “She touched everyone with her kindness and generosity. Examples.” There’s a deep readerly pleasure in this detective work, in asking how these two “books” are related, and why. Though their specifics differ, there is a shared belief in the near-religious power of market forces. As Bevel writes, “finance is the thread that runs through every aspect of life. It is indeed the knot where all the disparate strands of human existence come together.” But how can we trust him, or even be sure that all the strands cohere?

Diaz’s exploration of these questions, stitched together with various metafictional threads, owes something to the high-postmodern school of writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and David Markson. Gaddis’s mammoth second novel “ J R ” may be the novel’s closest relation, at least thematically; it centers on an eleven-year-old student who constructs a financial empire largely over the phone, highlighting the sheer chaos underlying financial genius. (The novel is written almost entirely in dialogue.) Even when the postmodern novel doesn’t portray the sprawling network of globalized finance, it’s drawn to shadowy networks that suggest it—for instance, the international postal-service conspiracy in Pynchon’s “ The Crying of Lot 49 .” Some critics have referred to these works as “systems novels,” books that map the myriad, often contradictory structures that define the modern world. Diaz’s novel, however, doesn’t quite fit this definition. Instead of trying to dramatize the sheer scale of global finance, each episode in “Trust” hints at the deceptions of a great, airy abstraction. The drama lies in trying to puzzle out where Diaz will take you next, what’s been hidden, and why.

Although “Trust” belongs to the postmodern tradition, its direct lineage is more specific. Just as “In the Distance” was a pastiche of the Western genre, “Trust” is a pastiche, too, though Diaz savvily disguises his sources. Is the book a sly take on the robber barons of the Gilded Age? A scrambled version of “ The Great Gatsby ,” with Rask and Bevel losing their loved ones despite their titanic wealth? Or is it an homage to Progressive-era novels like Theodore Dreiser’s “ The Financier ,” which is coyly cited in the text?

The philosopher Fredric Jameson placed pastiche at the center of postmodernism, calling it “blank parody”: a collection of codes or references, specific to a subject or field, that don’t make a particular comment on that subject, as a parody might. For Jameson, the form’s popularity was discouraging: books such as E.L. Doctorow’s “ Ragtime ,” though admirable, didn’t properly represent experience, instead borrowing styles, images, and ideas and rearranging them into a kind of fantasy. Global markets were another source of “dead language,” spreading the jargon of “faceless masters,” whose policies “constrain our existences.” Diaz’s achievement is to turn the weapon back on its wielder. He realizes that pastiche is similar to an option or a derivative—an act of placing value on the value of something, rather than on the thing itself. Using the tools of the “faceless masters,” he foregrounds the individuals, and the idiosyncracies, so often lost in vagaries of the system.

The third section of “Trust” continues to complicate the picture. Titled “A Memoir, Remembered,” its narrator is a famous writer named Ida Partenza, whose recollections begin as she strolls uptown to Bevel House, the financier’s mansion turned museum. Partenza, who has declined an offer to write about the museum, has a secret connection to Bevel: as a young woman, she was hired to ghostwrite his failed memoir. Her rise from humble Brooklyn origins into the rarified world of finance helps to expand the novel’s vision—under Bevel, she performed labor just as “invisible” as the banking exploits she was hired to embellish. Her education as a writer adds another self-reflexive touch; in order to invent her employer’s voice, she hit the library, looking for memoirs of “Great American Men,” learning to ventriloquize Bevel’s bland language of dollars. In some ways, her section is the most conventional one: it’s a bildungsroman with intrigue and round characters, shifting back and forward in time. Partenza’s father, a printer and anarchist ex-agitator, adds a political perspective that’s absent in the book’s more moneyed figures. Both a dreamer and a voice of reason, he has perhaps the keenest sense of the relationship between money and narrative: “Stock, shares and all that garbage are just claims to a future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.”

In the final section, Diaz turns to the most private part of this tangled network. “Futures” is the diary of Mildred, Andrew Bevel’s wife—the figure around whom so much of “Trust” revolves, but who has until now remained elusive. Mildred writes from a sanatorium, and her spare, cryptic jottings feel like the pearl at the book’s center, partly because they insist on the specificity of individual experience. Mildred is poetic in her attention to sensation, as when a nurse covers her “with a sheet that first balloons with a breeze of camphor and then settles with a waft of, I suppose, Alpine herbs. Gooseflesh.” Bevel believed that he could project his genius into the unfilled spaces of his memoir, but Mildred’s world seems to be receding, as death makes money irrelevant. She is deeply aware of the one experience that can’t be exchanged with anything else: “Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one.” The value she places on perception, its fleeting integrity, is antithetical to the financial schemes and elaborate fictions that characterize the rest of “Trust.” Diaz masterfully orchestrates a retreat that, while never disputing finance’s pervasiveness, hints at where a refuge from its predations might lie.

Financial faith relies on the notion that everything works out for the best, irrespective of individual desires. “Trust” gives the reader opportunities to feel that same tension in narrative itself, to question the apparently smooth operations of fiction while still becoming invested in its drama. Through these indirections, Diaz leads the reader on a journey from abstractions—all that literature is capable of representing, including the markets and moneymen that rule the world—down to something small, private, and experiential. Perhaps “Trust,” in the end, makes a surprisingly un-postmodern case for what the novel can do. It can deliver discrete, luminous sensations. It can make one subjectivity clear at a time. And it can help you appreciate experience—your hand in front of your face—before it disappears. ♦

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We Tell Ourselves Stories About Money to Live

Hernan Diaz’s new novel audaciously tells a tale of American capital—again, and again, and again.

Stories about American capitalism tend to have a recognizable villain: the robber baron, the business tycoon, the financial investor, your boss. But, as Karl Marx once put it, the evil capitalist “is only capital personified.” Far more chilling, he wrote, are the workings of capital itself, which, “vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Writing about that , as he knew firsthand, was much more difficult.

Look around today and it’s not hard to see capital’s life-sucking forces still at play: We sense them in tech companies’ profit motive , in the exploitation of migrant labor, in Amazon’s economic and physical domination . The world of industry and finance—and its long reach into our lives—has only grown more complex since Marx’s day. The challenge of writing about the shadowy system behind the “evil capitalist,” though, remains. How does one even begin to capture its contortions?

Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust , takes the challenge of narrating the entanglements of modern-day capitalism head-on. It begins with the lead-up to the Wall Street stock-market crash of 1929, following the sublime booms and busts of economic history from the vantage point of individual people. Trust is an audacious period piece that—over the course of four acts, each framed as a “book”—seeks to undo the hardened conventions undergirding myths about American power. And it deftly illustrates how stories about the nation’s exceptionalism are inextricable from the circulation of money.

Read: The paradox of caring about ‘bullshit’ jobs

Trust begins like a fairly conventional bourgeois novel that portrays the rich interior lives and domestic spaces of the elite ruling class. Its first book, “Bonds”—a salacious page-turner about a successful 1920s financier named Benjamin Rask and the mysterious illness and death of his wife, Helen—works like an act of narrative seduction, luring readers into the velvet-draped world of the 1 percent. “With perverse symmetry,” goes its gossipy narrator, “as Benjamin rose to new heights, Helen’s condition declined.”

Once it settles us in this milieu, however, Trust starts to strip it down to its foundations. Book two, “My Life,” is stylistically jarring: It’s the first-person account of a financier named Andrew Bevel, whose depiction of his stock-market success and his recently deceased wife, Mildred, eerily resembles the story just relayed in “Bonds.” Presented in manuscript form, Bevel’s autobiography is both bombastically overwritten (he frequently compares his life’s trajectory to that of the nation) and underwritten, peppered with little notes to himself to fill in details (“More on Mildred’s spirit”; “More home scenes. Her little touches. Anecdotes.”).

The overlapping characteristics between the two books are so uncanny that “My Life” initially reads like a mistake. On starting it, I kept flipping back to “Bonds” to confirm that I hadn’t gotten its characters’ names wrong. But book three, “A Memoir, Remembered,” clarifies the reason for this doubling. This first-person account is written by Bevel’s ghostwriter, Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian anarchist who works, much to her father’s chagrin, for their class enemy. Yet having been in Bevel’s confidence, Ida can, years after his death, now betray it: Her memoir reveals “Bonds” to have been the thinly veiled fictionalization of Bevel’s life following Mildred’s death. Bevel’s autobiography was, in turn, a highly orchestrated publicity stunt to override it—a project of “bending and aligning reality,” as he used to explain to her. Now “A Memoir, Remembered” is doing just that, once more.

In moving from the fluid, omniscient narrator of “Bonds” to Bevel’s badly written, halting I —and then subsequently revealing the latter to be manufactured as well—Diaz suggests that no individual perspective can be trusted. Each subsequent section torques and troubles how to approach the prior ones—the novel’s title becomes both a play on the financial instrument and an interpretive guide for the reader. Diaz keeps us guessing at what is “real” (a word that appears 34 times in the novel). We may think we know which character is most reliable, but tweak the lens ever so slightly and that comfort in an established viewpoint dissipates almost immediately.

The unraveling comes to a head in the enigmatic fourth book, “Futures,” which ultimately presents Mildred’s own, unfiltered voice. “Futures” consists of Mildred’s diary entries from her final days in a Swiss sanatorium as she appears to descend into madness. Mildred’s confessional scribblings convey the most private genre in Trust : They include the banal details of bad hospital food (“Already tired of milk + meat diet”) as well as more revelatory particulars about the hand she’s had in her husband’s financial success (“By trading in outsized amounts + inciting bursts of general frenzy, I started creating the lags”). With “Futures,” readers are forced to reevaluate what they thought they knew about the Bevels’ story—and about how money, and agency, gets distributed. If Mildred was in fact the financial genius in her marriage, she could only ever manipulate the stock market using her husband’s money and from his perch. Behind every powerful man, we might say, is a more brilliant woman running the numbers.

Read: Trust Exercise is an elaborate trick of a novel

We arrive at this realization not only through what Mildred writes but how she organizes it—not just through content but also through form. Her initial entries are clearly categorized under morning (“AM”), afternoon (“PM”), and evening (“EVE”), suggesting her attunement to the passing—and perhaps the consequences—of time. But by the end, her thoughts blur together. As Mildred’s body decays, so do her sentences, which start to fracture from paragraphs down to sentence fragments (“Confined to bed”; “No pleasure in juice”) and portmanteaus (“Befogged”; “Bird-crowded”). “Futures” concludes with ever more laconic phrases (“Mostly fruit / Hemicrania / Unable to do much”) that look less like the final lines of a novel than the beginning of poetic flight—of, we might say, future abstractions. The cozy bourgeois world of “Bonds” gets deconstructed, through Mildred’s words, into the harsh tones and angular vectors of high modernism. The progression suggests that one way fiction might approach the depiction of capitalist totality and its impossible forms is by presenting it, however futilely, through incommensurable shards.

That Trust ’s story unfolds rather like one of Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine stories isn’t happenstance. Originally trained as an academic, Diaz wrote his first book about Borges’s narrative puzzles. He’s also experimented himself with genre before: His debut novel, In the Distance , which was a finalist for a Pulitzer, was set during the California Gold Rush and played with the stylistic tropes of the Western. Trust continues to turn the screws of both genre and structure, relentlessly retelling the same story from different angles. “There is this priggishness around moneymaking,” Diaz recently told Vanity Fair , discussing the book. “It’s this enormous paradox in American history, between this priggishness and this hyperfetish around money.” In writing Trust , Diaz hoped to linger on some of the uglier aspects of wealth while also attending to people, and in particular women, who do not typically represent mythical American financial power.

Diaz shifts purposefully back and forth between these two lenses (the wide-angle and the close-up), sometimes even overlapping them in an uncanny palimpsest. In one striking scene, Ida observes Bevel staring out his office window, as a welder “sitting on a beam that seemed to be floating in the sky” looks back at him. She notes that “each man appeared to be hypnotized by the other,” before realizing that the welder is only gazing into his own reflection in the window. While Bevel can see the welder, the welder cannot look back—it’s essentially a one-way mirror. Rarely does Diaz inhabit the perspective of the worker, except when that worker comes within proximity to power (like Ida). More often, he gives texture to individuals who stand in (sometimes self-consciously) for the broader world of finance as a way of drawing readers closer to the abstract complexities of capital accumulation. In Trust , Bevel is almost the parody of a hubristic capitalist, writing in his memoir, “I saw not only the destiny of our great nation fulfilled but also my own.” But the arc of capital is longer than any single life, and Bevel hardly gets the final word here. As Ida and Mildred’s subsequent sections make clear, there is always someone else who can overwrite your story.

Trust ultimately refuses to clarify exactly what the true version of its story is, leaving readers to speculate on what is “real” and what is “fake.” Why Mildred suddenly gets sick right when Bevel’s fortune is ascending, and whether she’s the secret author of “Bonds” (a theory the reader is invited to entertain) are left open questions. “In and out of sleep,” goes Mildred’s final entry, “like a needle coming out from under a black cloth and then vanishing again. Unthreaded.” Trust ends not with a climactic bang but with a disappearing magic trick—and only the barest whisper of a possible heroine. We may not get close to grasping the heart of the mystery. But that’s hardly the point. Instead, we might at least begin to perceive how little it is we can see at all.

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Hernan Diaz on ‘Trust’ and Money in Fiction

Hosted by john williams, diaz talks about his second novel, and paul fischer discusses “the man who invented motion pictures.”.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The novel is, to a large extent, about the fictions woven around great wealth in America. And the main premise of these fictions is that of the self-made man. And I used the word deliberately.

Hernan Diaz talks about his new novel, “Trust,” which is told in four parts, each one changing the reader’s perception of all that has come before.

Louis Le Prince has just disappeared months before. And all of a sudden, here’s Thomas Edison, who’s got a reputation as someone who’s not entirely ethical, announcing what sounds a lot like Louis Le Prince’s invention.

Paul Fischer talks about “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures,” the story of a French inventor, Thomas Edison, a true crime mystery, and a history of early movie technology. Plus, my colleagues Greg Cowles and Liz Egan will be here to tell me what they’ve been reading.

This is the Book Review podcast. It’s May 6. I’m John Williams. [MUSIC STOPS]

Hernan Diaz is here. His first novel, “In the Distance,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. That book reimagined, or re-reimagined, the American Western. His new novel, “Trust,” is about New York City and the financial world and the 20th century. And it unspools in quite a creative way. Hernan, thanks for being here to talk about it.

Oh, thank you, John. My pleasure.

So two promises up front. We’ll walk listeners through this slowly. It’s a complicated story. And of course, in modern parlance, no spoilers, because there’s a lot you discover as you read this book. And we will only give people the outlines so they can discover the rest for themselves.

So the first thing to say is that you open this book, and you see the nice title page with your name on it, “Trust,” by Hernan Diaz. And I was expecting that. And then I turned two more pages, and I see another title page. Tell me about the first quarter or so of this book, what form it takes. And kind of describe it for what it is, if you will, as it exists in the book. What is this?

Sure. I should say— I like what you said about your experience of opening the book. I love the physical act of reading and how the body is involved in the act of reading. A lot of care went into the first thing you actually see when you open the book, which is a table of contents.

So what you encounter is four different texts, four documents, four books. They’re almost standalone in themselves. And this is already a clue. I was hoping the reader would become a textual detective as they enter the book.

So the table of contents is the first clue. So the first book— answering now directly your question— that you encounter is called “Bonds.” And it’s a novel by a fictional novelist called Harold Vanner. And it narrates the ascent of this American tycoon, probably one of the richest men in the whole world, and his relationship with his wife.

And it’s written in this very specific tone that echoes back to Edith Wharton and Henry James, although the book was written in the ‘30s. And this sort of slightly decadent tone was interesting to me. And it’s also a book very much about New York, about marriage, and of course about money and the myths woven around a great fortune.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more vivid cipher, if that’s not an oxymoron, than the character in this first book. It is his ascent. He’s described as someone who doesn’t take pleasure in the luxuries afforded by money. But he also doesn’t see it, finance, as a rewarding game, like bridge or chess, like you think he might— maybe it’s just a way for him to use his brain. What is Vanner’s take, this fictional writer, what is his take on who this person is and what his life meant?

That’s a wonderful question because what is an enigma for Harold Vanner is also an enigma for me. I was interested in the almost abstract quality of so many American fortunes that are not tied to goods or services, fortunes that are purely mathematical and speculative.

So in a way, the way in which Vanner sees this tycoon, whose name is Benjamin Rask, is as almost an aesthete of money. It’s an end in itself. It’s money for money’s sake, to paraphrase that dictum of art for art’s sake. And it’s an intellectual exercise.

There’s something also positively monkish and austere about this character. As you said, he’s not interested in all the luxuries that his fortune may afford him. He is interested in, to quote the book, the “incestuous genealogies” of money begetting money begetting money begetting money and how capital can be “force-fed its own body” to create more wealth and grow.

Yeah, that’s one of my favorite paragraphs in the book. Tell us briefly, and then I want to talk— because I want to avoid too many particulars, I do want to talk more about some of the themes of the book in general and some of the influences on it. But first, just discuss briefly, and as much as you’re comfortable sharing, what the other three documents in the book do— whether it’s specific or just generally, what you’re interested in in terms of their perspective on the original material.

The other three books— as you said at the opening, the whole book is one big spoiler. It’s very hard to talk about one thing without giving another thing away. But I will say this. The second book is very different from the first. It’s a memoir written by a real-life, in the world of the book of course, by a real-life tycoon.

And I will give this away, because I think it’s fun. We realize as we read this memoir that it is written to debunk the novel. So we have the real person on whom the fictional tycoon in the opening novel was based. And here is he, himself, in his own voice, to give readers the truth of his own story.

And it’s written in— I read a lot of memoirs written by, quote-unquote, “great men” of the period. And it’s written in a very blustery tone, very self-assured. And what I discovered while researching for this part of the novel is that all these memoirs written by these great men, financiers, presidents, captains of industry and so forth, is their absolute certainty that the accounts of their virtuous lives deserve to be heard.

And that is something that I wanted to convey in this part. I should also mention that it was written during the Trump presidency. So in reality, there was also a model for this voice.

A model for bluster—

A model for bluster indeed.

—to say the least. And then the third and fourth books, I think, are briefer and maybe shouldn’t be spoiled as much. But let’s say that they offer two other perspectives, so now we’ve gotten four different voices.

Exactly. The third and fourth books are, to my mind, the most important books in the whole book because, as we were discussing at the beginning of our conversation, the novel is to a large extent about the fictions woven around great wealth in America. And the main premise of these fictions is that of the self-made man. And I used the word deliberately.

But the truth is that these men stand on the shoulders of multitudes, silenced multitudes. And “Trust” wants to re-examine these myths and, in the process, give voice to those who were erased from these narratives. And I find that women have completely been deleted from these narratives of wealth and capital. In historical accounts, in fictional accounts, there simply are not women.

So the third and fourth books are narrated by women. The third book is narrated by the daughter of an Italian immigrant who lives in Brooklyn, not too far away from my home, and starts working as a secretary in Wall Street. And she is also a sleuth of sorts, piecing together the different aspects of the story.

And in the fourth book, we finally hear from the wife of the tycoon firsthand. It’s her personal journal. It’s a very intimate text. It’s very different in tone from the rest of the book, and it contains many revelations that I can’t discuss right now.

OK, I don’t think we’ve spoiled too much. There’s plenty still to learn. But now let’s zoom back and talk about— because I also want to note— maybe you don’t even think— whether you want me to or not, I want to note for listeners that we’re talking about this in a very jigsaw puzzle kind of way. The pleasures of the book are the fact that each of these individual pieces read like a dream. So I will just note that for the reader. So when you zoom out to the theme of finance, I’m curious about what sparked your interest in that subject, both in real life and then also as a subject for your fiction.

I think the answer is twofold. Firstly, I became interested in, let’s call it the gravitational pull that great fortunes have, their ability to reshape, distort and even realign the world and the reality around themselves. This is something I think we see very clearly nowadays. It seems almost as if the ultimate luxury good is reality itself.

That is the ultimate proof of a great fortune. Is it able to purchase a certain notion of reality and impose it onto others? Again, I think this is— perhaps unintentionally at the outset of the writing process— but I think this is something that we see today and that the novel deals with.

On the other hand, although wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative about itself as a nation and occupy this almost transcendental place in our culture, I was rather surprised to see that there are precious few novels that deal with money itself. Sure, there are many novels that deal with class— we were talking about Henry James and Edith Wharton a moment ago— or with exploitation, or with excess and luxury and privilege, many examples of that, but very few examples of novels dealing with money and the process of accumulation of a great fortune.

It seems almost as if this is a bit of a taboo. It certainly was a taboo for Edith Wharton and Henry James. They speak overtly of how unspoken this was.

But the thing that Wharton and James maybe wouldn’t have seen quite as starkly, and which you also seem interested in in the book explicitly is this transition from, let’s say, fortunes built from industry and other things to finance as its own wealth-generating sphere. From the evidence of the book, do you think that— not that it’s the only such story of course, because you have the world wars and technology and all kinds of other things. But I wonder if you see that progression, for lack of a better word, of finance as one of the profound stories of the 20th century?

I do see that progression. Of course, it starts to a certain degree during the Gilded Age, although I think that was more industry driven. It was steel. It was oil. It was shipping.

But researching the novel, it was interesting to see how cyclical crashes are in American history. So it seems in a way that this is embedded in the way in which the financial system is set up. Another interesting thing that I found reading and learning, because I come from a comp lit background. So you can imagine that learning about markets and monetary history was a steep curve for me.

But there was an interesting continuity between the way in which markets were viewed in the ‘20s during the big economic expansion of those years and the way in which fiscal conservatives think of the market even today, this idea of as little regulation as possible, small state, big business, no intervention, then also looking beyond our borders, this idea of exceptionalism but not being afraid of having tariffs whenever needed. Lower taxes, of course.

So all this to say that this playbook that we see coming up with— I don’t know— Harding and Coolidge in the ‘20s, reflects very much what I was reading in the newspapers during the Trump administration. And it also reflects what happened in the ‘80s with Ronald Reagan and the whole Milton Friedman school of economics. So I think there is an interesting line that goes from the 1920s to the 2020s. It’s not a coincidence that these thinkers called themselves conservative because it is extremely consistent and almost impervious to the other changes in reality you mentioned, such as— I don’t know— technology.

The research that you did for the novel makes it clear that you can write and talk about finance well. But let’s get you back on your firmest ground of comp lit.

Thank you so much.

Because, let’s be honest, it’s more comfortable for me too. So it’s selfish a little bit.

Our reviewer writes of you that “he has the whole literary past at his fingertips.” And whether you think that’s true or not, what were some of the developments in your taste or discoveries of writers you made starting when you were younger that has influenced you, whether you think those influences show up on the page or not?

I think the unavoidable name here is the Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges. And I even wrote a whole book about him. So he’s someone I care about very much. And he was a master of fictions within fictions and playing with genre and context and different canons and messing with literary borders of any kind. So I would say he is certainly a major influence.

We already talked about turn of the century literature, such as Henry James and Edith Wharton. They were very important. In the process of writing this novel, I also read quite a bit of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, who I think wrote very lucidly about finance, perhaps most lucidly in the American canon. Their books are very central to me in that regard.

I should also say that the last section of the book is a love letter to literary modernism, which is something that has shaped me very profoundly. We see there are many references, overt or tacit, to such writers as Jean Rhys or Virginia Woolf, even Wittgenstein, who is an important writer for me. I think I put all my influences on the table here.

I was going to say, you certainly gave people a sense of the breadth of the book, because all of those things somehow are in this book and fit comfortably together.

If I may interject also very briefly, there was very intentionally— in the progression of these four sort of sections that compose the book, there was very intentionally a journey from the last years of realism all the way into high modernism. And that is a formal progression that the readers may see there. But also, in the third book, the narrator, I thought of her as a new journalist. So it’s a completely different tone.

The other thing that strikes me between this book and your first novel is that you’re obviously interested in American myths, and whether or not it’s exploring them or redefining them or looking at them from different angles. Is that something that you feel explicitly inside yourself? Or is that incidental to some of the subjects you’ve been interested in writing about?

A little bit of both. It’s not that I go out searching for fossilized, ossified moments in American literature or in its consciousness, to use a word I dislike. I don’t go after them. But when they present themselves to me, I become fascinated with them. So I do see a certain continuity between both books. Although they’re immensely different formally, in terms of content, in terms of breadth, in terms of scope, everything. They’re just radically different books.

The conquest of the West was not just a mere adventure. It was very much aligned with the capitalist machine that was starting to churn around those years. And that very machine is what we see in “Trust,” now completely oiled and running full steam. So in that sense, there is a connection between books.

I would also say, as another way to address your question, that I wasn’t born in the United States. I’m an American by choice, although I’ve been here most of my life now, about 25 years. And I’m still fascinated by the place that fiction occupies in American history and in American culture, beginning obviously with the notion of American dream, which kind of says it all.

But I find that the United States is very welcoming to fictions. And there is a blend of fact and fiction in its history to an extent that maybe other countries, at least the ones I know a little bit about, it would be unimaginable in those other countries. This is something that makes me tick, that I find very interesting, this myth-making urge in American history. And it’s something that for some reason I decided to come back to in this book.

Whether you continue to find those myths in the next book or not, the absolute invention of both of your first two novels and the differences between them do make me eagerly anticipate what you turn to next. The new novel, again, is “Trust.” Hernan Diaz, thank you so much for being here to talk about it.

John, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.

Paul Fischer joins us now from London. His new book is “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies.” Paul, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. I’m really excited.

OK, we’ll make people stick around for the murder part. You don’t want to lead with that. We’ll hold that dangling for the future. Give me a thumbnail sketch of the man in your title, Louis Le Prince, up to 1888. And then we’ll talk about the remarkable thing that happened in October of that year.

Louis Le Prince was a tinkerer, I guess is the best way to describe him. He was a middle class Frenchman who lived in England and Yorkshire, who worked in a variety of different capacities, originally for his father-in-law at an iron forge. He’d worked as an assistant to a painter. He worked in panoramas. He ran a school of art at one point.

And he was a very tall, very striking Frenchman who had an interest in photography and art and invention and innovation and sort of humanism in the way a lot of middle-class Victorians did. And he was a war veteran, and he was someone who was trying to grapple with the world and was trying to find a new way to engage with it. And one day, while tinkering in his backyard shed in Leeds in Yorkshire, was handling some photographs, and they slipped in his hand. And he had this impression for a second that the people in the pictures were moving, and from that moment on, was obsessed with this idea of capturing life in moving photographs.

When did that moment happen, when the photos slipped out of his hand?

That was about 1880, 1881, from what I can gather.

OK, so he spends the next several years and his tinkering turns toward that objective.

It does. It took him about eight years to make the “Roundhay Garden Scene,” which is the oldest surviving motion picture and what we consider the first one ever made. And he was needing to sort of invent a medium as well as the technology, and invent what the medium would mean and what it would look like, and kind of writing about it. I had to unpack all our assumptions about motion pictures, because Le Prince and others like him were trying to figure out what that meant in real time.

And so in October of 1888, that first— what is now considered the first motion picture— where was it? How did he take it? How long did it last?

The fun thing is it’s a home movie, which is an odd thing, because we don’t think about the first pictures as that kind of thing. We think of it as an industrialized medium to start with. But the “Roundhay Garden Scene,” essentially, Le Prince had a very heavy, big mahogany wood camera. And he lugged it to his in-laws’ house, and he set it up in the yard.

And he asked his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his son and a family friend, to just do goofy walks, really, in the garden in a circle. And what survives is a few seconds long. The numbers on the contact sheets suggest that the film itself was at least 10, 15 seconds long. And what we have is just a family smiling and self-consciously walking around outside the house, which kind of suggests one of the ways Le Prince thought this technology could be used was the same way you used a family album, the same way you use our phones now, to just kind of record everyday life and not just tell stories.

What were his bigger dreams about what motion pictures might lead to or might be? Because obviously, it’s interesting to think back to when you could have sort of a boundless imagination about it and not foresee some of the ways that it has come to be used.

Well, what’s fascinating about Le Prince, and what I really loved as a film nerd myself, is that he seems to have been the first one of that generation to really have a vision for what the medium could be. There were a lot of people like Thomas Edison or the Lumiere brothers, who were working on moving image projects as a kind of novelty toy. Their idea was, this can make a little bit of money, at least for a while. And then it’ll fade away.

And there were other people like Eadweard Muybridge or the French scientist, Etienne-Jules Marey, who were scientists and who really thought moving images would be a way to deconstruct the way our bodies work, the way things move, the way nature worked. And Le Prince was really the first to write in his notebooks and speak to his family about this medium as something that would change the way we related to reality.

As I said, he’d been in a siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. And he would tell his wife, there’s absolutely no way a mother would ever send her child to war if we could make a film of what war was actually like, as opposed to romanticized paintings or that kind of thing. He would talk about ending the powers of priests and kings because people would be able to see how alike we were and how we all lived in similar ways.

And he conceived of it very early as a collective kind of experience. He designed panoramas, which were these huge, 360-degree painting entertainments, where you’d step into a warehouse or a disused skating rink or a theater. And you’d be surrounded by these huge paintings that recreated a battle scene or a scene from history.

And Le Prince imagined that film would be like that. He had this idea for something he called the people’s theater, which was benches in front of a screen and a stage, very much a cinema. And he was convinced that, in that kind of space, in that kind of room, with life projected at the actual scale it happened, you could teach people and you can entertain them.

And he had lists of possible filming subjects. They ranged from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to methods for teaching deaf children sign language or lip reading. And so he had this huge overarching vision for how this would change the way people related to one another.

Yeah, very lofty and idealistic ideas, and also sounds pretty visionary in terms of— it sounds like immersive virtual reality almost, what he’s describing, putting people in these places and letting them see the panoramic view. What happened in the time after he made that first picture with his family? What were the developments right after that in terms of what he attempted to do with it? Or how did he attempt to, perhaps, put his name on it more firmly?

Well, the year before Le Prince disappears, there’s kind of a year, year and a half between that “Roundhay Garden” scene and him vanishing, which is really the mystery at the core of his story. And that year is also a mystery because up until that point, Le Prince had applied for patents and received them in the United States and England and France and Belgium and all these different countries. And so he held the legal right to the first motion picture machine, and he’d taken these films.

And after this “Roundhay Garden” scene, which seems to have been a kind of apex successful test of his prototype, we know that he developed or tried to develop more polished machines he could take to market. We know that he asked his wife Lizzie to rent the Jumel Mansion in New York Uptown and renovate it and get it ready for a first public screening. And we know that he demonstrated the machine for the secretary of the Paris Opera, to what purpose we don’t know for sure, but it seems as an ongoing discussion for whether they would use motion pictures at the opera as part of their shows.

And then in late 1890, so coming up to two years after that first film, Le Prince in his letters tasks the men he was working with in England to pack up his stuff. And he tells friends he’s going to New York to meet his wife at this mansion to premiere the invention. And he goes back to France to meet his brother for a kind of goodbye visit. And at the end of that visit, he gets on a train to Paris and vanishes, never to be seen or heard from ever again.

At this central mystery, one of the conjectures over time involves another very famous inventor, Thomas Edison. Tell us a little bit about both Edison’s kind of parallel tracks, such as they were, in terms of tinkering with film, and then maybe a little bit of what became one theory about what might have happened to Le Prince. And you can, obviously, feel free to not spoil too much if you don’t want to.

You know, it’s really interesting looking back, as even though he’s considered today one of the inventors of the motion picture, looking back at the timeline back then, he was really late out of the blocks. Le Prince had made the “Roundhay Garden” scene by the time Edison and Edison’s men were really getting started with working on their own version of a motion picture device. And the Edison that exists at this point in his life and in history was a fascinating figure to me because he was immensely famous and immensely recognizable, especially for his time.

But he was kind of on a cold streak. After developing an early reputation as a genius, his reputation had turned at this point to where he had his lab in West Orange, New Jersey. He’d moved away from Menlo Park, which is where his first fame had been made. And he’d announced the phonograph, but it wasn’t really developed enough to be saleable.

And he was in protracted legal battles with George Westinghouse over direct current and alternative currents. And he was touting this light bulb that he said was cheap and would be available to everybody. But he had only really been able to install it in JP Morgan’s house and a few businesses.

And so he kind of had this reputation as a guy who wasn’t entirely honest and was mocked regularly in the newspapers for talking the talk and not being able to walk the walk anymore, and for perpetually announcing stuff that he was never completing. In this context, Edison seems to have been looking for the kind of oversimplified one last great big score, one last big way to reestablish himself as a genius. And one day, he meets Eadweard Muybridge, who was a photographer, had made the famous images, that are still famous, of a horse animated at a trot and a gallop.

And Muybridge, who was touring and giving talks, suggests to Edison, you know, if we took your phonograph and my moving images and developed the two together, we could literally recreate life and project that for people. And that would be pretty brilliant. And Edison, hearing this, tells Muybridge, maybe sometime down the road. And then when Muybridge has left, Edison tasks some of the people who work for him with coming up with exactly that idea, with the only difference being not involving Eadweard Muybridge.

And so there’s a young Scotsman working for Edison called William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. And he was the man who did most of the work of inventing what would become the kinetoscope and the kinetograph for Thomas Edison. And the setup was very much like a modern work-for-hire agreement. Someone like Dickson worked at the lab, did the everyday inventing. And Edison and the company would take the credit, the same way an Apple phone is an Apple phone.

And then a few months after Le Prince disappears, the front page of The New York Sun, suddenly out of the blue, announces, quote, “Edison’s newest wonder,” which is this machine that can capture life and replay it and project it on a screen. And Lizzie Le Prince and her friends and her family pick up the paper that morning. And Louis Le Prince has just disappeared months before.

And all of a sudden, here’s Thomas Edison, who’s got a reputation as someone who’s not entirely ethical, announcing what sounds a lot like Louis Le Prince’s invention, without there being any record of Thomas Edison developing this invention beforehand. And so this idea, this conspiracy theory that Thomas Edison would have got rid of Le Prince to steal his invention, actually starts at the source and is born with Le Prince’s family, because that’s what they became convinced of.

So that theory gained some traction over the years. And let’s say that you do some digging of your own, and you— I don’t want to spoil everything that you conjecture yourself. Is it safe to say, though, that this is a fascinating mystery that remains unsolved in terms of actually being able to pinpoint precisely what happened?

It does, yeah. I come up with a theory that I’m fairly convinced about, that there was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing towards. But there’s no smoking gun. That’s one of the frustrations about— or at least one of the lessons about writing a book like this one is you get started, and your ambition is, I’m going to solve this. I’m going to— there’s going to be something like in the movies, ironically, where I go to an archive, and there’ll be a little letter in the back of a book. And it’s a confession. And that stuff just doesn’t exist.

Right, to prove or disprove it.

Exactly. But at the same time, I kind of tried to approach it somewhere between a prosecutor and one of those law enforcement talking heads on a Netflix documentary series. And the conclusion I get to, treating it like a cold case, is one that I feel really confident, OK, if I had to go make this case in a courtroom, it’s a pretty solid case. But it is very circumstantial because it’s been 150 years. And it was a cold case from the start because, due to the way people communicated in 1890, it was three or four weeks before anybody even realized Le Prince was gone.

I just want to be clear. So when you say that if you were making a case, it’s pretty solid. Are you talking about a case against Edison or another case entirely?

A case against someone else. It’s weirdly not a spoiler because I think one of the things about the book is it becomes evident really quickly in the book, as it did in my research, that Edison’s a red herring, that this idea, as sexy and exciting as it is that Thomas Edison would have been this kind of Lex Luthor figure assassinating people left and right to steal their stuff, it’s exciting because it’s outlandish. And so I try not to indulge it too much in the book beyond using it as a hook.

Well, it is fascinating. And obviously, the book, in addition to being this mystery, is also very much, as I think people can tell from you discussing it, is very much about the early history of development in film. And you’re a film producer yourself and involved in that world. And I just wonder if researching it, how surprising and delightful that was to just go back into that time. I was struck reading it, just thinking about just how young film is, being reminded of that, and how remarkable it is that we can even look back and see those early developments the way you might, for the first people who ever wrote anything down or something.

It was brilliant because I’m one of those people. I really love films. And I am one of those people who has grand ideas and grand speeches about what it does as a medium. And with that come equally large anxieties about where the medium is now. And I’ve got a 7-year-old daughter. And will she actually go see films in a cinema? Or will it all be on a computer— and the communal experience of it and the dying out of that.

And when I started writing the book, my concern, I thought, would be to try and explain in what way Louis Le Prince was the first. And I was worried that would take a lot of technical explanation about frame rates and perforations and innovation. And all that stuff fell to the wayside, and it was really fun to transport myself into a world where people were trying to articulate all the things that make me love movies and to be rediscovering my kind of love for film through these people inventing what that would be. My hope is that, alongside the kind of true crime of it and the history of it and the fascinating characters of it, one would read it and also rethink some kind of appreciation for whatever that medium becomes, because you’re right. It is very young for what sets it apart from the others.

Well, you have murder and the movies both in the subtitle. And I think it is very much about both of those things. And I appreciate you taking the time again to talk about it. Paul Fischer’s new book is “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures.” Paul, thanks for being here.

Thank you very much, John.

My colleagues Greg Cowles and Liz Egan join me now to talk about what we’ve been reading. Hello.

Greg, I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve had you on, which is insane, because you’re the foundation of this segment, I feel like. So what have you been reading lately?

I am reading a memoir that came out last fall called “Music,” comma, “Late and Soon.” It’s by a Canadian poet named Robyn Sarah. That’s Robyn, R-O-B-Y-N.

And it is her first book of nonfiction, I believe, not about poetry, but as you would guess from the title, about music. She studied piano from elementary school, like into her 20s, and actually departed piano to seriously study clarinet for about 10 years, thinking that she would become a professional clarinetist. And she spent some years in Quebec as first clarinetist in her teens in the conservatory there, working towards the path of being a professional musician before she fell away from it and got into writing instead and became a poet.

And this is about her return to music decades later. She’s now in her 60s. The book opens when she’s approaching 60 and starts fooling around on piano again and getting more and more into it, not obviously as a professional anymore, but as a passionate amateur. And she looks up her original music teacher, her original piano teacher in Quebec, who is still, it turns out, accepting students. He’s, like, 80 now.

And he kind of puts her off at first. He sends her to a different teacher. And she plays a recital with that teacher, and he shows up. And he hears it, and he says, you know what? Maybe I’ll take you on again.

And this is a book about her falling in love with piano again and very much about her relationship with this teacher, who’s a wonderful character. He’s this kind of Yoda guru type. He says things like, “The future creates the present. Resist intelligence. Reflex is unreliable.” He’s got all these sayings that you feel like, how is he even helping her?

But somehow, he’s got this amazing way with his students. He thinks of himself more as a coach than as a teacher. But he very much breaks things down into the technical aspects.

And I’m somebody who’s played piano for most of my life, mostly not with teachers. Although, when I was younger, like Robyn Sarah, I studied with teachers from early elementary school right through high school. And I took it up again with a jazz teacher in my 40s in New York City. I used to go on my lunch breaks from work once a week up to a building in the West 70s and study with a jazz teacher there. And I’m not great. One of the things this book—

You’re still working at the Book Review anyway.

I’m still working at the Book Review.

We’re happy to have you.

One of the things this book has driven home for me is how much proficient, high-level musical performance is like high-level athletic performance, because you need to nail it in the moment. You have to have it exactly right and be able to turn it on in front of a crowd. And it’s daunting.

And I fool around, and I’ve learned a lot of the music theory and broken it down. I like studying music. There was a day I went to one of my lessons. I showed up a little bit early, and the student before me, I could hear through the door, was finishing up his lesson. And he was just riffing on top of a bass line that the teacher was laying down. After he left, I went in and I said to the teacher, wow, how long has he been studying? He’s really good. And my teacher said, yes, well, he’s very talented.

He started last Tuesday.

Yeah. And I felt like, OK, I get it. I can read between the lines. But I love it, and I would not give it up.

And so this book, “Music, Late and Soon,” by Robyn Sarah, is partly— it’s a tribute to the amateur and doing something just for the love of it, whether you’re good at it or not. And again, she’s far better. She does perform. And even so, she’s not good enough to be professional. But she’s more dedicated and has internalized more of it than I have. But it’s a book about not needing to be the best at something to still pursue it, to do it just because you love it.

Yeah, I wouldn’t pursue anything if that had to be the case.

That’s me. That’s, like, the mantra of my life.

Yeah. I wonder if— our critic Alexandra Jacobs recently reviewed a book called “Uncommon Measure,” by Natalie Hodges, which is a memoir.

Yeah, yeah, that’s actually what turned me to this book. I have not read the Natalie Hodges. But also, it’s about somebody who is studying to be a professional violinist who dropped it.

Yeah. And it’s a little bit the opposite. It’s at a different moment in time. She’s still a relatively young person, a very young person, I think, Hodges. And it’s basically about how she turned away from it, gave up aspirations to be professional. I do wonder if, later in life, she’ll sort of return to music in a less pressurized way.

So it’s interesting that this person’s perspective might potentially portend that.

Liz, what instruments can you play? And what have you been reading lately?

I took piano for six years. I never learned how to read music, which is a little bit like looking at books for eight years and never learning how to read.

I don’t think that’s true at all.

Well, I was a real failure. There was a lot of pressure in my family to practice an instrument. And I absolutely hated it.

And before I tell you what I’m reading this week, I also just want to comment to you, Greg, that I love books that have punctuation in the title. So I appreciated that you shared the comma with that. The first book I can remember noticing it in was “Girl, Interrupted,” by Susanna Kaysen, which was made into a not-so-great movie, but was a wonderful memoir that came out in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. And I remember thinking that was peak intellectual with a capital I, to have a comma in the title of your book. I always notice that, or ones that have a question mark.

Anyway, so what I am reading is “French Braid,” by Anne Tyler. It’s her 24th novel. It is the story of 60 years and multiple generations in one family, the Garrett clan of Baltimore. Before I tell you any more about it, I should pause here and say, 60 years in the span of 256 pages is an impressive feat for Anne Tyler, who is an impressive person in the first place. But she pulls it off, and we meet Robin and Mercy, who are the parents in this family.

They get married sometime, I think in the 1950s. They have two daughters and a son. And we get to meet them on their one and only family vacation at the beginning of the book that sort of echoes through the whole book. There are things that happen on that vacation that are seminal for the family.

And we see them at different points as the kids are growing up, as the kids are grown. And I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a pandemic piece of this novel. I think it was the first novel that I read that included the pandemic to great effect, I thought.

The book “French Braid” was reviewed for us by Jennifer Haigh, who also has a wonderful new book out called “Mercy Street.” And she described the Garrett family as a loving but aloof family in which everything is unsaid. And the main thing that is unsaid is the fact that Mercy, the mother, the matriarch in the family, who is an artist, quietly and without fanfare moves out of the family home in Baltimore into her studio after her youngest child leaves home. And nobody in the Garrett family says a word about it. It is simply never discussed.

And as with all of Anne Tyler stories, I would say the drama of this one is in the silence or in the kind of tension that fills the silence in the family. And that, to me, is powerful stuff. I don’t know if the two of you are Anne Tyler fans.

I would call myself an admirer. I’ve only read a couple of the books, and it was a long time ago. I’ve actually been meaning to reread one of them which I remember especially liking. But she’s had one of those remarkable careers, where when you said it was her 24th novel, it sounded low to me.

I know. I know. It fills more than one column when they print the titles of all the author’s previous books. It fills at least two columns, which is, to me, the mark of a very prolific author.

And also, in her case I should note, she has this gift for finding the language of the age of every character she’s writing about. The book begins with two— actually one younger member of the Garrett family, one of the grandchildren of Mercy and Robin. And this woman is in her— she’s a college student, so I’m hardly up on the lingo of college students. But it just rang really true. She can slip into the skin of all different ages. And I find that incredibly impressive.

I also just wanted to read one little quote from Jennifer Haigh’s review, which I totally agreed with and absolutely loved. She said, ”‘French Braid’ is a novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.”

I mean this is a compliment, but I feel like that describes the books of Tyler’s I read as well.

So John, you’ve just added, like, 22 new Anne Tyler books to your list. But what are you reading now?

I’ve recently read, to write about it for the paper actually, Patrick McCabe’s new book, “Poguemahone.” And I’m going to talk about that but an earlier book a bit more. The new one, “Poguemahone,” is a 600-page novel in free verse. No book is for everybody, and this is also one of those books.

But I think the people who give it a chance, many of them will find a good amount of delight in it, especially in the first half, even though it’s a sort of dark, strange book. The first half recounts the exploits of these squatters, these hippie squatters in the 1960s in London, who were in a primarily Irish neighborhood in the city. And they imagine themselves as creating this somewhat utopian vision. But of course, what they’re really doing is giving LSD to dogs and things. They’re getting into all kinds of trouble. And this is all related by this—

Are you saying that’s not utopian, John? [LAUGHTER]

Fair question.

So the narrator is confiding all of this to us in a somewhat drunken style. And he and his sister were part of this crew. And now in the modern day— and this is back in the mid-‘70s. And now in the modern day, he’s talking about his sister’s life in a coastal nursing home.

And it’s clear from the beginning that we’re not getting the whole story here, that this is a very unreliable narrator. And so what follows is kind of a reveal, as well as all these anecdotes. What I found interesting about this, in terms of my own trajectory as a reader, is that I had read back in, I believe it was the ‘90s, his novel “The Butcher Boy,” which was kind of a sensation at the time. It was the first book of his published in the U.S. I think it was his third novel. It was a finalist for the Booker Prize. It was later adapted into a film by Neil Jordan, I believe, which I never saw. But this made me go back to it because it was such a distinct reading memory, but I didn’t know if it would hold up. And I’m always interested in that kind of thing.

And it really does. It’s about this young boy named Francie Brady, who grows up in small town Ireland in a depressed town with parents who were some mix of abusive or well-intentioned but absent, and a tough childhood. And he gets involved with this woman and her son. And he overhears the woman one day calling his family “pigs.” And this has the effect of taking this probably already-very-on-his-way-to-trouble kid and hastening that trip.

Michiko Kakutani reviewed it for The Times. It was 1993, so I was a wee lad when I read this book the first time around.

John, you weren’t that wee.

I wasn’t that— well, my age ended in “teen,” so I feel like that’s pretty wee for at least one more year. But Kakutani’s lead paragraph says, “To get an idea of Francie Brady, the narrator of Patrick McCabe’s mesmerizing new novel, imagine Holden Caulfield as a young man growing up in a desolate Irish town. Imagine Holden speaking in an idiomatic Irish dialect full of Joycean rhythms. Imagine Holden as a real madman, a cold-blooded if strangely soft-hearted murderer, willing to commit unspeakable acts to avenge himself on the phonies who surround him.” It’s not a terribly long book. It’s about 225 pages. And it essentially flies by because this kid’s voice— and he narrates the book is— it takes a little bit of time— I wouldn’t say terribly long, just a few pages— to really fall into the groove of it. But once you do, it hurtles forward. So that’s an oldie but a goodie.

John, I like you’re going so deep into your Irish roots this year with Fintan O’Toole, with “Poguemahone.”

Fintan O’Toole’s, yes, terrific new personal history of Ireland, modern Ireland, is great. And “Poguemahone” I think, if that description, which is a bit gonzo, but if it at all appeals, I would suggest to check it out. And his earlier work is certainly interesting.

His star has dimmed a bit in the years since “The Butcher Boy,” at least in the U.S. But I think he’s a really interesting writer at his best. OK, let’s run down what we’ve been reading again. Greg?

The memoir “Music, Late and Soon,” by Robyn Sarah.

I am reading “French Braid,” by Anne Tyler.

I read the new novel “Poguemahone,” by Patrick McCabe, and his earlier book “The Butcher Boy.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at [email protected].

The Book Review Podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m John Williams.

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Hernan Diaz’s second novel, “Trust,” is four books in one. Our reviewer, Michael Gorra, calls it “intricate, cunning and consistently surprising.” It starts with a novel inside the novel, about a man named Benjamin Rask, who builds and maintains a fortune in New York City as the 19th century gives way to the 20th. Diaz describes writing the uniquely structured book on this week’s podcast, and the ideas at its core.

“Although wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative about itself as a nation, and occupy this almost transcendental place in our culture, I was rather surprised to see that there are precious few novels that deal with money itself,” Diaz says. “Sure, there are many novels that deal with class — we were talking about Henry James and Edith Wharton a moment ago — or with exploitation or with excess and luxury and privilege. Many examples of that, but very few examples of novels dealing with money and the process of the accumulation of a great fortune.”

Paul Fischer visits the podcast to discuss “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures,” which is about Louis Le Prince, who made what is now widely acknowledged to be the first known moving picture, and the story of his mysterious disappearance as well.

“What was fascinating about Le Prince — and what I really loved as a film nerd myself — is that he seems to have been the first one of that generation to really have a vision for what the medium could be,” Fischer says. “There were a lot of people, like Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers, who were working on moving-image projects as a kind of novelty toy. Their idea was, this can make a little bit of money, at least for a while, and then it will fade away. And there were people, like Eadweard Muybridge or the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, who were scientists and really thought moving images would be a way to deconstruct the way our bodies work, the way things move, the way nature worked. And Le Prince was really the first to write in his notebooks and speak to his family about this medium as something that would change the way we related to reality.”

Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and Elisabeth Egan talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Music, Late and Soon” by Robyn Sarah

“French Braid” by Anne Tyler

“Poguemahone” by Patrick McCabe

“The Butcher Boy” by Patrick McCabe

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

Kirkus Prize winner

New York Times Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize Winner

by Hernan Diaz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2022

A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.

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.

Pub Date: May 3, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-42031-7

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE

by Matt Haig ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2024

Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.

A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.

In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024

ISBN: 9780593489277

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

More by Matt Haig

by Matt Haig

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Summary and Reviews of Trust by Hernan Diaz

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

• BookBrowse Review:
• Critics' Consensus:
• Readers' Rating:
• First Published:
• May 3, 2022, 416 pages
• May 2023, 416 pages

• Historical Fiction
• Mid-Atlantic, USA
• New York State
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Latinx Authors
• Publication Information
• Write a Review
• Buy This Book

About This Book

• Book Club Questions

Book Summary

An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds , a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz's Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. According to the back of the Rask family Bible, in 1662 his father's ancestors had migrated from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where they started trading in tobacco from the Colonies. Over the next century, their business prospered and expanded to the extent that part of the family moved to America so they could better oversee their suppliers and control every aspect of production. Three generations later, Benjamin's father, Solomon, bought out all his relatives and outside investors. Under his sole direction, the company kept flourishing, and it did not take him long to become one of the most prominent tobacco traders on the Eastern Seaboard. It may have been true that his inventory was sourced from the...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Trust is a novel that is told through four separate documents – a novel-within-the-novel, an unfinished manuscript, a memoir, and a diary. Why do you think the author chose to tell the larger story this way? How do the different sections speak to each other?
• Each separate piece of the book offers a different character's perspective on the same period, subjects, relationships, and events, revealing new truths and calling others into question. Which revelations surprised you most? Whose perspective and narrative did you most enjoy or value and why?
• One of the major themes of Trust is power, who has it, how they got it, how they maintain it. Another theme is history, how it gets decided and shared, and who gets to tell the story. How...
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Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

The novel is like a feminist retelling of a classic, male-oriented story, except that the original story is also one that Diaz wrote. Look at what is missing from these accounts, he implores us. Who do you believe? Trust is conventional in that our most pressing questions of plot are answered at the end, but there is no climactic eureka moment, where some crime is solved and the criminal is dramatically exposed—although there is one reveal, late in the book, that provides that satisfying feeling of shock and recognition: "Of course, how could I have not seen it coming?!".. continued

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(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer ).

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Beyond the Book

How tv & film portrays capital accumulation.

Hernan Diaz has said about writing his novel Trust that, despite the numerous books depicting "the symptoms of wealth," "there are very, very few novels that deal with the process of accumulation of capital. This, to me, was baffling." This isn't surprising to me, as the accumulation of capital seems narratively uninteresting, at least less interesting than stories about the lives of wealthy people or the psychological wounds that keep them from appreciating their money. The accumulation of capital Diaz is talking about—investment—is not even necessarily "striking it rich." It is often having a significant amount of money in the first place and growing it, which is interesting in its perverse banality, but not exactly exciting. ...

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Author Interviews

Hernan diaz's anticipated novel 'trust' probes the illusion of money — and the truth.

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks with Hernan Diaz about his novel, "Trust." It tells the story of a New York tycoon who takes advantage of the 1929 crash, and his attempts to rewrite and control his own story.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Trust: Book Summary and Ending Explained

By: Author Luka

Posted on Last updated: August 14, 2024

Categories Reading Guides

Trust, a novel by Hernan Diaz published in 2022, delves into the life of Andrew Bevel, a financier who rises to immense wealth by betting against the 1929 stock market crash.

The book garnered attention by being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and it’s the author’s second novel after the success of In the Distance, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Structured into four distinct narratives, Trust explores conflicting perspectives on Bevel and his wife. It delves into themes such as the influence of wealth, the intricacies of financial systems, and gender dynamics.

Summary  |  Ending Explained

Trust Book Summary

The story starts with a book within the book called “Bonds,” written by Harold Vanner, which is a best-selling novel that parallels the lives of Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen, with the characters Andrew and Mildred Bevel featured in subsequent sections of Trust.

“Bonds” portrays Rask as an introverted individual who inherits wealth and business acumen, eventually becoming a successful investor after profiting from a market crash. Despite his financial success, Rask remains focused on investing rather than indulging in luxuries.

Helen, Rask’s wife, hails from a once-wealthy family in New York, now facing financial decline. Her upbringing, marked by her father’s eccentricities and her mother’s struggles, leads her to seek freedom through marriage to Rask.

After World War I, Helen discovers that her father has disappeared from the psychiatric hospital where he was being treated. Despite efforts to locate him in Europe, he remains missing, leaving Helen devastated.

In response, she immerses herself in philanthropy, becoming a patron of the arts and supporting mental illness research, an interest she shares with Rask. Although they admire each other, their relationship lacks passion.

As the crash of 1929 looms, Rask anticipates it and profits greatly by betting against the market, while the rest of the country suffers through the Great Depression. Accused by the media of manipulating the crash, Rask remains indifferent to the widespread hardship. While the Rasks face social ostracism, Rask gains even more prominence on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Helen, feeling guilty over her husband’s actions, dedicates herself to organizing economic relief efforts. Her mental health deteriorates, fearing she may suffer the same fate as her father.

Eventually, she requests to be admitted to the same Swiss psychiatric hospital as him. Under Dr. Frahm’s care, she experiences some improvement with holistic treatment, despite Rask’s skepticism.

However, when Rask plans to have her transferred to a facility under his control, Helen deteriorates rapidly. Rask dismisses Dr. Frahm and replaces him with his own doctors, who administer experimental treatment involving inducing convulsions, which tragically results in Helen’s death.

Returning to New York, Rask finds that his wife’s death doesn’t significantly alter his life. Despite continuing to invest, he never achieves the same level of success as before. He resigns himself to a solitary existence, convinced that he genuinely attempted to live a life beyond investing.

The narrative then shifts to Andrew Bevel’s autobiography, penned by Ida Partenza, though it remains unfinished due to Bevel’s death. In it, Bevel seeks to present a more positive image of himself than portrayed in Vanner’s novel. He describes himself as a New York financier driven by a combination of interpersonal skills and mathematical acumen inherited from his ancestors.

Bevel emphasizes his belief in aligning self-interest with the common good, viewing his investments as a service to society. He depicts his wife, Mildred Howland, as a nurturing homemaker, though subsequent books reveal her significant role in his successes.

Mildred’s untimely death from cancer profoundly affects Bevel, prompting him to continue her charitable work in her memory.

In 1985, Ida Partenza revisits the Bevel mansion in search of the truth about the Bevels, a mystery she never fully understood. Flashing back to 1938, Bevel hires a young and struggling Partenza as the ghostwriter for his autobiography. He pays her generously to shape his story, particularly to downplay the significance of Mildred, Bevel’s wife, and make him appear superior.

Exploring Mildred’s former rooms, Partenza discovers a side of her that contradicts Bevel’s portrayal of her as a simple homemaker. Partenza realizes she’s aiding Bevel in erasing the true Mildred from history, especially after discovering that Bevel had Vanner’s work removed from the New York Public Library.

Before they finish the autobiography, Bevel dies suddenly from a heart attack. Partenza later becomes a successful writer and journalist. In 1985, during her return to the Bevel mansion, she finds Mildred’s journal, “Futures,” chronicling her time in a Swiss psychiatric hospital.

Mildred’s journal reveals the truth: she, not Bevel, was the mastermind behind their investments. Initially, they worked together, with Bevel providing the funds and Mildred devising the strategies. However, their collaboration became imbalanced, leading to tension between them.

Learning of her terminal cancer, Mildred decides to short the stock market, a move that secures Bevel’s status as a top investor. She arranges for hospice care in Switzerland and continues to guide Bevel’s investment decisions until her passing, tired of managing his ego but reconciled to their partnership in her final days.

Trust Book Ending Explained

First, lets talk about the final novel, “Futures”. In “Futures,” Mildred Bevel’s journal entries from her time at a Swiss psychiatric hospital while battling cancer offer a contrasting perspective on her life with Bevel compared to what was presented in earlier books. The entries are short and often lack dates, marked only by the time of day she wrote them.

Mildred recalls her life with Bevel in fragments. The initial years of their marriage lacked passion until Mildred’s successful investment in philanthropy in 1922 sparks a change. When Bevel tries to replicate her success and fails, they begin collaborating on investments. Mildred teaches Bevel to think creatively, but he struggles to understand her innovative strategies and feels emasculated by his reliance on her guidance.

In 1926, Mildred discovers a way to exploit stock market inefficiencies, but Bevel secretly manipulates the market for his gain, leading to a rift between them. During their two-year estrangement, Bevel’s investments become conservative while Mildred focuses on music and philanthropy.

Mildred predicts the 1929 market crash but conceals her terminal cancer diagnosis from Bevel until after the crash. She continues directing his investments while battling her illness, even as Bevel takes credit for her success. As her health deteriorates, Mildred regrets not allowing Bevel to take charge and struggles with his inability to understand her feelings.

Throughout her hospitalization, Mildred reflects on her childhood memories and the nature of journaling. She finds parallels between the church bells’ logic and the stock market, using musical analogies to explain her investment strategies. As her journal entries become more fragmented, Mildred finds solace in nature as she approaches the end of her life.

Overall, the final part of the novel, Book 4 of Trust, introduces a new narrative style through Mildred’s diary, which blends fragmented memories and stream of consciousness. This fragmented form challenges readers to piece together its contents and apply the revelations to the conflicting narratives presented in the preceding books, akin to a detective solving a case.

While the earlier books instilled a sense of skepticism towards tidy narratives, this final book re-establishes trust through its raw and seemingly unguarded style.

One significant aspect of Mildred’s diary that reverberates throughout the other books is her definition of kitsch in relation to La Fiesolana, a Tuscan-style vacation home Bevel claims she adored. But she actually hates it because it’s a copy of Tuscan architecture.

She calls this type of copy “kitsch,” saying it values looking like the original more than being original. This idea of kitsch connects to the theme of storytelling and finance being like fake copies of reality.

Bevel’s infatuation with La Fiesolana shows he can’t tell real from fake. He presents himself as intellectually deep, but Mildred sees through this façade, noting that he mistakes uncertainty for profundity and indecision for thoughtful analysis. His grasp of the world, particularly in the realm of investments, is superficial.

He attempts to replicate Mildred’s success using a copied strategy, resulting in a hollow and artificial symmetry devoid of genuine passion, much like a player piano mechanically reproducing music without the soul of a skilled pianist.

Mildred’s diary seems like it holds the truth missing from earlier books. But like them, Futures isn’t straightforward. It’s written without an audience, which makes readers trust it more.

Since it’s the last part of Trust, readers expect it to solve the mystery, like in detective novels where the killer is revealed. Trust, with its surprises and false leads, puts readers in the role of detectives, expecting the final section to unlock the secrets of Bevel and Mildred’s life.

Happy reading! ❤️

I love to read and I enjoy exploring a range of genres including contemporary and historical fiction, mysteries, thrillers, nonfiction, and memoirs. If you would like me to review your book, feel free to reach out to me!

Sunday 11th of August 2024

Best thing I can say about the book was the use of "higher words" meant to stimulate our vocabulary and the clarity of the sentence structure. Beyond that, sometimes you can make stories over-complicated. This aint Tom Sawyer.

Ginny Kelley

Monday 1st of January 2024

I was a little skeptical about the novel in the beginning, but it soon grabbed me and I was intrigued. Some sentences I found having to reread as I did not want to miss the “meaning “. The characters a true representation of gender roles, especially at the turn of the century. I particularly felt saddened by the two wives roles, who were portrayed as rather weak characters, but far from the truth. Ida was a complex protagonist and played many roles. I enjoyed reading about her character. What started out slowly for me, I found that half way through I was binge reading to find out what would happen. Good read

Hernan Diaz Personal Trainer   Reviews

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Hernan is very precise in his…

Hernan is very precise in his recomendations, i learned from him the importance of doing the right exercise with right technique, so i don´t loose energy and time during my trainings. He is dedicated to each one of his students, and he is able to easily detect what each of them requires according to their goals. He is very methodic and encourages you to give your best. Highly recomended

Date of experience : 14 September 2024

I’ve been training with Hernan for a…

I’ve been training with Hernan for a few months, and the results have been incredible! He is highly knowledgeable, motivating, and always tailors workouts to my needs. Whether you're a beginner or more experienced, Hernan knows how to push you while making sessions fun and engaging. I've never felt stronger or more confident. Highly recommend!

Date of experience : 12 September 2024

Hernán is great !

I’ve been training with Hernán for some time, and his workout routines are top-notch and highly professional. His approach is tailored to my needs, and his ongoing support and follow-up make a big difference. Even though he's now working remotely, his dedication and expertise shine through. I highly recommend him for anyone looking for effective and well-structured online training!

Date of experience : 13 September 2024

He is the best!

Working out with Hernán is always a pleasure, he truly is a profesional. The routines are always adapted to your capacities and your goals. We always have fun besides training. As an athlete, I would recommend Hernan no matter your level and experience when it comes to working out.

Full professionalism

Full professionalism, great knowledge and always with an amazing sense of humor! An amazing trainer, he will do everything to achieve his goals, and he cares deeply! I recommend it with all my heart and all the muscles I had no idea existed!!!

Excellent personal trainer

Thank you for teaching me over so many years and for keeping me safe during every exercise we do. I appreciate your professionalism, dedication, and the advice you've given me to improve and shape my body.

Hernán is a great trainer

Hernán is a great trainer! He is always attentive to your personal need and intereses. He changed the way I trained, and manly he motivated me! His routines are great muscle builder! I highly recommend him… he knows what he does and he loves it!

Date of experience : 11 September 2024

Hernán is an exceptional personal…

Hernán is an exceptional personal trainer who is both professional and dedicated. He's tailored a personalized training routine that's been incredibly effective, and his follow-up support has been invaluable. I highly recommend him for his excellent work.

Hernan Diaz PT review.

The most important thing to highlight in my own experience is the personalization of my workouts; Hernan creates training routines for me that directly aim to achieve the goals I want, from a specific muscle group to routines to achieve better performance. One of the things that continues to motivate me day after day to continue training with Hernan's training plans is being able to see all the knowledge he has to prepare from great athletes to people who are just starting to exercise. Another thing to highlight is his great commitment to keep all his students motivated and eager to continue training. 100% recommended.

Excellent trainer

Excellent trainer, I used lot of the online trainings! Feel really happy with my progress and Hernan is really supportive and open to questions and doubts! Thanks a lot Hernan!

Date of experience : 23 February 2024