Trust (#1589)

 

As the result of a conversation with friends about the meaning of the word “trust,” I stumbled onto the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel Trust, by Hernan Diaz. It’s a complicated book which is told in four parts. The book begins with the depiction of a novel, Bonds, which describes the enigmatic characters of Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen. Rasks were fictional characters who were thought to modeled on the real lives of Andrew Bevel and his late wife Mildred. The plot had to do with the fabulous wealth that Rasks (Bevels) had accumulated during the 1920’s, and how Benjamin multiplied his own wealth many times over during the same time that nearly everyone else was losing their shirts. Andrew Bevel was angry at the author’s depictions of him and Mildred in Bonds, and he set out to destroy that author’s credibility. Rather than seeing himself as the cause of the failure of the entire financial system, Bevel saw himself as the savior of the American financial world.

 

Although he was a savant regarding his financial dealings, Bevel lacked empathy to understand others around him, and he did not have the writing skills to pen his own autobiography. He hired a new secretary Ida Partenza to do that job for him. The question that was confronted by the reader was whose version of Rask/Bevel was to be believed. She reported that Rask often edited out specific material in the draft of her book about him and Mildred, and added material that she knew to be untrue.  

 

Finally, some decades later, the fourth version of the story was penned by Bevel’s wife Mildred, a version which was much different that had been described by Rask, Bevel, and Partenza. It was Mildred’s writing which brought all the plots together and laid out the truth regarding the primary characters. One comes away from this reading with some questions about which friends one should trust, and how one should make such evaluations.

 

This is a great book, and I’m in agreement with the wide acclaim that Trust has received. Over the course of my own life, I find myself to be quite fortunate to have gathered together a group of friends with whom I could trust my life. And they know they can trust me with theirs. In regard to the depth of my friendships, I am a wealthy man.