In Trust’s second section, Bevel speaks for himself. 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.” 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. As Vanner writes of Rask, “He created a trust meant exclusively for the working man. 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. Diaz’s ventriloquism here is stellar: As Venner, he channels Edith Wharton in an arch yet irresistible voice. 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. A finance titan in the early 20th century, Bevel has built spectacularly on fortunes amassed by his forebears. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some. Published in 2017, Diaz’s debut, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money. Free markets are never free, as he suggests our desire to punish often trumps our generous impulses. Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory. 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. 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. 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.

'Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.'į. Hernan Diaz’s “Trust” Is a Literary Tour de Force Author photo: Pascal Perich

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