“Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.”
Hernan Diaz, Trust, 2022
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Whom would you trust to tell your story after you are dead?
An author who wants to spill your family secrets? Your famous spouse who is obsessed with his legacy? An activist who believes you were a misunderstood icon? Which of these would get closest to the truth?
Trust is the fictional story of the myth of the memories of Mildred Bevel, wife of 1920’s billionaire and Wall Street tycoon Andrew Bevel, presented in four distinct ways.
There is the schmaltzy novelization where Mildred is the suffering and frail wife who tragically dies in an experimental electric shock procedure.
There is the thin outline of her husband Andrew’s self-indulgent autobiography, a Rockefeller or Carnegie-esque businessman who confines her to the edges of his own rise to the apex of capitalism in an age of “Great, Self-made Men”.
There is the ghostwriter, who is forced to turn Andrew’s outline into the next “biography of a great American man,” all while she wonders who Mildred really was.
Then there are Mildred’s own sparse, cryptic journal entries, uncovered a lifetime after the events, which reveal the edges of the mysteries at the heart of her and Andrew’s stories.
This was a fantastic study in unreliable narrators, pulling the threads in a fabric woven by narcissism, empathy, misogyny, power, and legacy. Highly recommend.