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
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Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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Themes
The Distorting Power of Wealth
Bevel wields his enormous wealth to bend the world to his will. His manipulations fall into two categories: manipulation of the stock market and manipulation of his public image. He does this in multiple realms: He manipulates the stock market to his advantage; he effectively destroys Vanner and his book Bonds, pulping all copies and erasing Vanner from the records of the New York Public Library; and he hires Partenza to fabricate his life story. More than just spinning public opinion in Bevel’s favor, these combined efforts alter reality itself, changing what’s true/disturbing people’s ability to determine truth.
Bevel gives Partenza a candid, boastful description of his job: “My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake” (266). Right and wrong have a double meaning here. The first meaning concerns being correct or incorrect: He makes an inaccurate prediction about the market and then uses his power to reshape the market to his prediction.
Bevel frames his alignment of reality as a moral imperative: Rather than distorting, his wealth corrects reality. “Alignment” denotes correction in both the moral and economic sense, as if in aligning reality Bevel believes he’s righting a wrong. He reiterates this belief throughout My Life and A Memoir, Remembered, casting himself and his forefathers as moral financiers whose investments, while turning them into a profit, are also good works that serve the public: “Our prosperity is proof of our virtue” (275). In the story he tells, shorting the crash of 1929 wasn’t a selfish bet against the nation but a necessary, even patriotic correction of the market: “I felt obliged to take a short position. This was not only because it was the reasonable thing to do as a businessman. It was also my attempt, as a concerned citizen, at correcting and purging the market” (184).
The multiple perspectives offered in the four distinct books of Trust challenge Bevel’s self-righteous portrayal of himself, ensuring that he doesn’t gain the narrative hegemony he wants. In My Life, Bevel presents his short as a righteous act—the channeling of his power for good. His autobiography is an attempt to squash the narrative of his selfishness and replace it with one of righteousness and patriotism. This narrative of selfishness is resilient, however: To the media and the public, Bevel’s short is an outsize manipulation of the economy, a wealthy man wielding his fortune to bend the world to his benefit. Helped as he is by his godlike reputation on Wall Street and by the reality-altering power of his fortune, Bevel ultimately fails to erase all record of his lies—to erase all traces of his bending of reality (and therefore to cement a new one).
In Futures, Mildred exposes that Bevel isn’t a righteous god but a criminal who bribed a ticker operator at the New York Stock exchange to rig enormous profits for himself (387). Moreover, Bevel didn’t short the market; Mildred did. Underlying the facade of Bevel’s boundless influence is a banal secret: He’s a rich criminal appropriating his wife’s investment skill to appear as an investment genius.
Narrative Truth and Finance as Artifice
Narrative truth and finance are mirages. As a mirage tricks the viewer into seeing water, narrative truth and finance trick people into mistaking fictions for reality. Trust describes a world like our own, a world in which fiction has become more compelling than reality. To read the successive books in Trust—each of which refracts the last, revealing something previously hidden—is to approach the mirage and realize what one thought was there isn’t. This metafictional structure constantly surprises the reader, upsetting the narrative they thought to be true. The characters in Trust vie to have their narrative become the truth, to see their perception reflected in their world. There is no hierarchy of truth over fiction, only narratives competing for supremacy. Narratives describe reality with varying accuracy, but they are never completely accurate. The closest the reader can get to truth is to triangulate it from multiple competing narratives.
In Trust, Diaz highlights the various ways in which fact and fiction intermingle, rendering that dichotomy meaningless. Fiction infiltrates the real world, and the real world infiltrates fiction. The novel plays with different genres, mixing narrative fiction (Bonds), autobiography (My Life), memoir (A Memoir, Remembered), and diary (Futures). The interplay between these four narratives challenges the distinction between fiction and nonfiction: For example, Bevel’s autobiography, classified as nonfiction, distorts reality more than Vanner’s novel. Bevel laments that Vanner’s narrative has supplanted reality: “The imaginary events in that piece of fiction now have a stronger presence in the real world than the actual facts of my life” (236). While Bonds fabricates less than Bevel himself—particularly in that it doesn’t portray Mildred as a simpleminded housewife—it shouldn’t be mistaken for the truth. Bonds fills the narrative void Bevel leaves with his extreme privacy. It’s a story about a famous person made compelling by hewing to the right balance of believability and dramatization, avoiding both banal reality and fanciful fiction.
Just as Bevel’s autobiography masquerades as the absolute truth, the stock market masquerades as an assessment of concrete value. Bevel espouses this fiction, asserting that “[t]he market is always right” (181). Everyone buys into this fiction in the boom preceding the crash of 1929, mistaking stock price for actual value. The collapse of the bubble reveals that rather than a pure reflection of the economy, the stock market is a collection of people betting on what will be, not describing what is. As Partenza’s father says, “[s]tocks, shares and all that garbage are just claims to future value” (216). Reality (actual price) doesn’t always meet expectation (desired price). The stock market isn’t the infallible organism of Rask’s imagination—the perfect map of reality—but speculation based on a mix of actual and imagined value. Like fiction, the stock market contains both truths and exaggerations.
Patriarchy as Poison
At almost every turn patriarchal power affects the female characters in Trust. Both Helen Rask and Ida Partenza suffer domineering fathers convinced of their own absolute importance. Helen dies because her husband insists on controlling her psychiatric care. Partenza endures a boyfriend and boss who feel threatened by the success of the women in their lives. Mildred bears her husband getting credit for her investment successes. The men in Trust demand attention and give nothing in return; they live as if they are the main characters in their own stories and the women surrounding them are their supporting cast.
A patriarchal dynamic poisons the Bevels’ relationship. In Futures, Mildred describes having to navigate around Bevel’s fragile ego. Sometimes to get him to follow her investing strategy she has to trick him into thinking he’s thought of the strategy himself by planting the seed of the idea in his head. This dynamic—Bevel needing to feel smarter than he is and Mildred feeding him ideas—affects them both, creating a relationship defined by mutual loneliness. Unlike Helen, Mildred is not a passive victim to her husband’s will: Mildred chooses to collaborate with Bevel despite the compromise of herself. However, this compromise eventually becomes too much: “It’s not that I’m tired of him. I’m tired of the person I become around him,” Mildred remarks (368). The belief that the man should be the breadwinner and the brains of a relationship precludes the possibility of the Bevels sharing an alternate dynamic.
Partenza’s father forcefully dominates and defines her life. He’s not portrayed as a malicious man intent on crushing his daughter to his will; instead, he’s portrayed as a good-intentioned man who cannot tolerate his perceived failure. As an anarchist, Partenza’s father is ostensibly anti-authoritarian and pro-equality. However, he acts as a sort of dictator in their home, proscribing and thereby defining Partenza’s life:
He had, perhaps against his doctrines and even his own will, encompassed my entire world and endowed it with meaning and something resembling lawfulness […] Over time and through a mysterious transmutation I had derived a sense of safety from all that was erratic and unstable in our life together (343).
As Partenza’s sole parent, her father establishes the norms that define her life. This dynamic carries into adulthood when, despite supporting her father financially, Partenza remains emotionally beholden to him. Ironically, her father claims to believe in equality for women while betraying that belief in his actions. When Partenza applies for a secretarial job to rescue them from the debt he will not or cannot rescue them from, he reproaches her for contributing to her own oppression: “Secretary was a demeaning occupation, he said. It promised independence but was another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men” (210). In demeaning his daughter, Partenza’s father’s true object of scorn is himself, the man who cannot provide for his family. The patriarchal dynamics in Trust favor the men, giving them power over women; however, these dynamics also leave the men unhappy and dissatisfied.
