The Labyrinth of Voices Behind Money: The Battle for Truth in Hernan Diaz’s Trust

The moment I opened the first page of Trust, I stepped into a labyrinth built from wealth and lies. The 1937 bestseller Bonds tells what seems to be a conclusive tale: the story of Wall Street tycoon Benjamin Rask and his mentally fragile wife, Helen. But when I reached page 117, the narrative takes a turn—Andrew Bevel, a financial magnate, begins recounting his own version of events in his autobiography. In this telling, his wife Mildred is a charitable and graceful woman who died young of cancer. It’s only when the memoirs of Ida, the daughter of Italian immigrants, and the diary of Mildred herself surface that the trap of storytelling becomes apparent: history is not written by truth, but by power and capital.

A Quartet of Narratives: Deconstructing Truth Through Form

Trust constructs its narrative maze through four distinct literary forms:

Bonds (the novel): A hollow portrayal of Helen as the archetypal “madwoman,” her character floats like a ghost across the pages—no flesh, no blood, just a phantom sculpted by capital.

My Life (the autobiography): Bevel constructs a polished success story, relegating his wife to a decorative, irrelevant presence in an attempt to overwrite the negative image from the novel.

Ida’s Memoir: From the perspective of a working-class woman, the veil over the financial empire is lifted. She reveals Bevel’s attempt to manipulate history by hiring her as his ghostwriter.

Mildred’s Diary: In scrawled handwriting lies the buried truth—Mildred was the true financial genius. Her so-called madness was a cage built by her husband to steal her accomplishments.

Diaz once admitted, “At first, this was a novel about money. In the end, it became a novel about voices.” When Mildred scribbles stock formulas in her diary, and Ida discovers that her employer encodes financial strategies in musical notation, the intelligence erased by Bevel’s narrative finally pierces through the fiction. Capital may buy stories—but it cannot imprison truth forever.

The Madwoman and the Ghost of Finance: Silencing Under Patriarchy

The subversion of the “madwoman” trope in this novel is chilling. Bevel systematically casts his wife as mentally ill, even forging a fictional hereditary history of insanity. This isn’t random—Diaz sharply critiques a long-standing trope in Anglo-American literature: “There’s a horrible stereotype of intelligent, sensitive women being portrayed as unstable or mentally ill.”

Yet, when Mildred coolly analyzes market fluctuations in her diary, or mentally calculates compound interest during a concert, the contrast between the "mad" narrative and her actual brilliance is striking. The ultimate irony lies in Bevel’s eulogy—“In dark times, she was a beacon”—which reads less like tribute, and more like Prometheus's thief mourning the fire he extinguished. That light, stolen from Mildred, could have illuminated Wall Street.

The Silent Witness: An Immigrant Woman’s Double Resistance

Ida Partenza, the narrator of the third section, is the novel’s most poignant soul. As the daughter of Italian immigrants, she breaks into the male-dominated world of finance through her gift for writing, only to face an ethical dilemma when hired to ghostwrite Bevel’s memoir. Her father—an angry, impoverished man weighed down by disproportionate rage—stands as a tragic symbol of immigrant silence.

In an interview with Bi Feiyu, Diaz revealed that this character was difficult to write because “there’s so much of my father in her.” Ida’s navigation between a crumbling apartment in Brooklyn and a gilded office in Manhattan paints a vivid picture of early 20th-century immigrant women: they cracked open office doors with typewriters, only to be forced into scripting the burial of truth for the elite.

Bayesian Reading: Navigating the Narrative Labyrinth

Reading Trust feels like a Bayesian exercise in probability. Each new text functions like a new piece of evidence, forcing the reader to constantly revise their understanding of “truth.” What seemed like harmless fiction in Bonds is reclassified as malicious fabrication in light of Bevel’s autobiography. When Ida exposes her ghostwriting role, the authority of Bevel’s account collapses. Finally, Mildred’s diary resets everything: the grand financial myth was nothing more than the theft of a woman’s genius.

This layered structure is itself a lesson in critical thinking. Through his use of metafiction, Diaz shows us that when a story seems too perfectly constructed, one must question the silence surrounding it. As the novel declares: “The closer you get to power, the quieter it becomes. Authority and money exist in a vacuum of silence—you can measure a person’s influence by the thickness of the hush around them.”

When I closed the book, the city lights began to twinkle outside my window. The neon of the financial district shimmered in the glass—an illusion, much like the narrative maze Bevel built with capital. In an era where information is weaponized, Trust acts as a prism, revealing that “truth” is often just the version sanctioned by power. But Diaz ultimately shines a light on those long buried by history: Mildred’s resurrected financial brilliance in her diary, and Ida’s reclamation of narrative sovereignty behind a typewriter. When their voices finally breach the walls built by capital, we hear a truth money cannot distort.

Perhaps that’s why, when I shut the book, it wasn’t the clang of Wall Street I heard—but the steady, determined rhythm of two women knocking on the locked doors of truth, deep in the vaults of time.

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