Trust

Trust is a 2022 postmodern novel by Hernan Diaz. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Trust is the second novel by Diaz, whose first book, In the Distance (2017), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Primarily about a financier, Andrew Bevel—who becomes the richest man in the world by shorting the stock market crash of 1929—Trust contains four distinct books in which different characters provide conflicting accounts of the financier and his wife. The compounding narratives explore the power of wealth, the artifice of the financial system, and the gender politics inherent in both.

This guide uses the 2022 Riverhead Books paperback edition.

Plot Summary

The first book in Trust is a novel within a novel, a bestselling roman à clef titled Bonds, by Harold Vanner. Bonds follows the investor Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen. Vanner bases the Rasks on Andrew and Mildred Bevel, who appear in the following three books in Trust. Andrew Bevel is an investing savant who becomes the richest man in the world by shorting the stock market crash of 1929. Mildred Bevel is a music lover and philanthropist who dies at a young age from cancer.

In Bonds, Rask is presented as an asocial, dispassionate boy born into a long line of successful tobacco traders. When he’s orphaned at 18, he inherits his father’s fortune and business. After he profits from the crash of 1893, he discovers his first and only passion: investing. Rask sells his inherited business and properties and starts an investment firm on Wall Street. His prescient trades quickly garner him a reputation as an investing savant. Though he adopts the trappings of the wealthy financier, Rask’s fascination remains in investment, not luxury.

Rask marries Helen Brevoort, with whom he shares a similarly reserved personality. Helen comes from an old-money New York family whose fortune is all but exhausted. Prior to meeting Rask, they flee the ignominy of falling from wealth by undertaking a years-long tour of Europe. From a young age, the precocious Helen is tutored by her intellectual father, Leopold, in a range of subjects. These years of happy tutorship deteriorate when Leopold becomes obsessed with an esoteric theology that he forces Helen to study. Helen’s mother, Catherine, eventually commits Leopold to a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland. At the beginning of World War I, Helen and her mother flee Europe for New York, where Catherine ingratiates herself to Rask and seeds in him a desire for Helen. Helen agrees to the marriage because she sees that Rask will give her the freedom her parents denied her.

After World War I ends, Helen learns that her father disappeared from the psychiatric hospital. Rask has men search Europe, to no avail. Devastated, Helen throws herself into philanthropy, becoming a patron of the arts. She also develops a shared interest in mental-illness research with Rask, who owns a stake in a company pioneering psychiatric drugs. Rask and Helen admire each other, but their relationship is passionless.

Anticipating the crash of 1929, Rask shorts the market and profits immensely while the country suffers. The media accuse him of rigging the crash; he remains callous to the nationwide hardship of the Great Depression. While the Rasks become pariahs in society, Rask becomes a god on Wall Street. Ostracized by her artist friends and racked by guilt over her husband’s role in the crash, Helen throws herself into organizing and funding economic-relief efforts.

Helen’s mental health declines; she worries she’s succumbing to the same illness as her father. Eventually she requests to be committed to the same Swiss psychiatric hospital as her father. Under the head doctor, Dr. Frahm, she improves with an untraditional holistic treatment. Rask dislikes the doctor and his treatment because he doesn’t understand either. After Helen discovers his secret plan to have her transferred to another facility under his control, she rapidly deteriorates. Rask fires Dr. Frahm and brings in his own doctors, who perform an experimental treatment based on preliminary research. The treatment, which involves chemically inducing convulsions, kills Helen.

Rask returns to New York, where he realizes his wife’s death did little to change his life. Though he continues investing, he never replicates the profits of his golden years. He returns to the solitary, dispassionate life he led as a bachelor, convinced that he made a sincere attempt at living a life outside of investing.

The narrative switches to Andrew Bevel’s autobiography, ghostwritten by Ida Partenza. It appears unfinished: Bevel dies before they complete it.

The autobiography sketches a portrait of a man similar to Rask but determined to dispel the negative impression Vanner’s novel gave of him. Bevel is a fourth-generation New York financier who combines his father’s people skills with his grandfather’s mathematical talent. Like his forefathers, he believes in marrying self-interest with the common good and views his investments as a service to the nation. He marries Mildred Howland, a woman he portrays as a childlike homemaker but who is, as Books 3 and 4 will reveal, the mastermind behind his successes. Mildred dies of cancer at a young age, devastating Bevel. He continues her charitable fund in her memory.

Ida Partenza revisits the Bevel mansion in 1985, searching for the truth about the Bevels she never learned. The visit brings back memories: In 1938, Bevel hires Partenza, then a 23-year-old aspiring secretary suffering the effects of the Great Depression, as the ghostwriter for his autobiography. Bevel pays her well to embellish his life and make Mildred less threatening to his superiority.

Partenza sneaks into Mildred’s former rooms, which speak to a personality radically different from the innocuous homemaker Bevel describes her as. Partenza realizes she is helping Bevel to erase the real Mildred from history. Partenza fears Bevel’s power after seeing that he’s erased Vanner from the New York Public Library.

Bevel dies of a heart attack before he and Partenza finish his autobiography. Partenza goes on to become a celebrated writer and journalist. In 1985, when she returns to the Bevel mansion, she finds Mildred’s journal, Futures, from her hospice stay at a Swiss psychiatric hospital.

Mildred’s journal reveals it is she, not Bevel, who is the investing savant. The two have a collaboration of sorts, Bevel providing the money and Mildred providing the strategy. This collaboration quickly becomes unequal and results in a rift between them. Mildred learns she has terminal cancer around the time she decides to short the stock market, resulting in the coup that cements Bevel as an investor nonpareil. She arranges her hospice care in Switzerland. Her illness reconciles Bevel to her, but she’s tired of having to manage his ego. She continues directing his investing strategy until her death.