67 pages • 2 hours read
Hernan DiazTrust
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Book Club Questions
Symbols & Motifs
Illegibility
Some stories are more intelligible than others. Familiar narratives with familiar characters are easier to understand than the unfamiliar. The motif of the illegibility of Mildred’s handwriting fleshes out this theme of intelligible versus unintelligible narratives. In contrast to Bevel, who writes an autobiography aimed at the masses, Mildred writes journals in illegible script. Bevel wants his story told in a language everyone understands; Mildred knows that even if she wrote in legible script none would believe—or understand—her story. The illegibility of Mildred’s script symbolizes the unfamiliarity, even unintelligibility, of her story to the people of 1920s America.
As Partenza learns in her research of titans of finance, Bevel easily fits the mold of the ostentatious New York financier promulgated in fiction and the media; he can be cast as a familiar character. His fictional counterpart, Rask, even molds himself to this type to hide his true character that people find eccentric. There’s an established part for Bevel to play. There’s no part like that for Mildred: As a woman, she cannot be a titan of finance, let alone the most successful investor in the world.
Bevel consigns his late wife to the readymade role of the gentle and innocuous homemaker. The real Mildred, no longer there to speak for herself, remains an enigma shrouded by the past and Bevel’s obfuscations. The librarians’ description of Mildred’s personal papers as the Voynich Manuscript symbolizes this enigmatic nature: Just as the 15th-century manuscript remains a code without a key, so too does Mildred remain a story locked in the past. It’s not just that she has bad handwriting: Her unique, illegible script represents the private, almost unintelligible nature of her story. The character of the successful woman needs to enter the public imagination to render Mildred’s story legible and therefore intelligible. This happens 50 years after her death, when Partenza discovers and deciphers Futures. In deciphering the journal, Partenza enters Mildred’s story into history, a history previously defined by Bevel’s story.
Downtown Manhattan
The skyline of downtown Manhattan symbolizes the illusory nature of finance: Downtown Manhattan is a synecdoche for Wall Street (and Wall Street the common metonym for American finance). Money is an abstract construct people agree represents concrete value in the form of goods and services. In this sense, Partenza’s father says, money is a fiction (216). This means that finance is doubly a fiction—“the fiction of a fiction” (216)—because it is a bet that 1) something will be worth more (or less, in the case of shorting) in the future and 2) that that abstract monetary worth will map to concrete value.
The speculative nature of investment is often forgotten, and the stock market seen as more real than reality itself. Bevel’s claim in My Life that “the market is always right” exemplifies this view (181). To Bevel, the market precedes reality, dictating what should and shouldn’t be; it takes on a life of its own, the sterile organism of capital in Bonds (16). The market doesn’t map perfectly to reality because it’s driven by bets on future value, not assessments of present value. Partenza recalls her father’s view:
Whenever we found ourselves walking along the waterfront, he would point at lower Manhattan, tracing the skyline with his finger while explaining that none of it really existed. ‘A mirage,’ he called it. Despite all those tall buildings—despite all that steel and concrete—Wall Street was, he said, a fiction (215).
The concreteness of downtown Manhattan contrasts to the illusory nature of the money and investment it represents. The metaphor of downtown Manhattan as a “mirage” provokes thought: Diaz raises the question, for Partenza and the reader, of how something so concrete could in fact be an illusion. The market is a matrix of speculations and is therefore fundamentally fictional.
Wealth as Otherworldly
Throughout Trust, wealth appears as an alien world apart from everything else. Wealth casts a spell, disorienting, enticing, and enrapturing those who see and experience it. When Partenza reports to Bevel’s offices in downtown Manhattan, she’s overwhelmed each time by vertigo. The sheer scale of his wealth, symbolized by the soaring skyscraper, ungrounds her, estranging her from her familiar world; from Bevel’s office, her home city is unrecognizable. Bevel’s wealth seems designed to make Partenza (and everyone else) feel inferior: “[His luxuries] made me feel unwelcome and alien. As if I were a displaced earthling, alone in a different world—a more expensive one that also thought itself better” (332). Wealth sets itself apart as a transcendent world.
Wealth is also otherworldly in its silence. Silence is a hallmark of power, and money allows you to insulate yourself from the world: “Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them” (232). Partenza experiences the luxury of this silence in her limousine ride through New York: Watching the city from the quiet bubble of the car, she feels powerful and invincible (333). The very fact of her separation produces these feelings. As its own world, wealth makes the wealthy feel like gods watching the world from Mount Olympus.
