“Trust” by Hernan Diaz - review

 “Trust” by Hernan Diaz:

This book had me engaged and fascinated from start to end. It is Hernan Diaz’ second novel after his much acclaimed, In the Distance from 2017, which was a Pulitzer finalist. 

It is a story, a very intriguing, ingeniously crafted, multi-layered, highly intelligent, complex story about immense wealth, money, love and tragedy told in four distinct but connected narratives. It is a novel about empires, crashes, husbands and wives, immense fortunes and great misery. 

Retelling the same story from different angles it opens with a novel inside a novel called Bonds which transports us back to the Roaring Twenties and subsequent Depression. The author of this buttercream fiction, too rich in every way, but pleasantly so, is one Harold Vanner. There are hushed mansions, gilded cages and eery sanatorium scenes which could come straight out of The Magic Mountain. In heavily descriptive, omniscient, sometimes melodramatic early 20th-century style, reminiscent of Edith Wharton or Virginia Woolf, we learn of the life of an reclusive who, in the years leading up to the Great Depression, through his cunning and seemingly preternatural understanding of the stock market, rose to one of the most obscenely rich men in the U. S. His good luck is only counteracted by the mental and physical decline of his wife. The titular Bonds could refer to either monetary instruments or familial attachments. 

Bonds is followed by My Life, the draft of the memoir of Andrew Bevel, an autobiography in progress. Bevel is a very successful and famous New York financier, clearly the model for the tycoon in Bonds and we find many parallels to incidents and characters in Vanner’s novel. It is a rather pompously self-righteous account written in the first person and follows every convention of the bloated autobiographies of tycoons. 

This text is followed by A Memoir, Remembered by a striving first-generation Italian American woman named Ida Partenza, now a successful and established writer, then just over 20 years old, a woman at the beginning of a life of her own. The memoir, set in 1938 and written in 1981, promises the clarity of a female third party, a voice refreshingly free of an overblown ego. She tells the story of how Andrew Bevel hired her as a ghostwriter to give shape to his memoir manuscript and to set the record straight because he feels Vanner wrongly painted him as the direct cause of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression and misrepresented his sweet, simple wife as a gilded-caged creature. Decades after Andrew’s death, Ida returns to his mansion, now a museum, to figure out who Mildred really was. Ida slowly discovers Andrew Bevel’s hidden motives in concealing Mildred’s superior intelligence and her crucial role in expanding his business. Ida’s narrative seems to be so far the most plausible. Through it we begin to see the real Andrew Bevel. Or, rather we think we do. 

The last text we get to read is titled Futures. Ida Partenza discovered it in her research and it consists of diary entries from the deceased brilliant wife of Andrew, Mildred Bevel, as she writes about her final days in a Swiss sanatorium. After the novel form, the autobiography and the memoir we finally get to read a primary source. And again everything we thought and assumed after reading the first three narratives begins to shift again. Because of its unfiltered, straight, unpretentious, honest voice this is maybe the most emotionally demanding and touching of the four narratives. As Mildred’s body decays, so do her sentences, which start to fracture from paragraphs down to mere fragments of sentences.

We slowly begin to understand why the novel is called Trust. It is not only about the financial construct, about money, but also about the trust we place into people. And it is about the trust the reader places into the author. Four different voices, four different literary styles, four different disparate perspectives on the same story. As soon as one story ends the truth of everything that came with it is upended by the next story and so forth. Which narrator do we trust? One, all, none? No individual perspective can be trusted. This ingenious quartet of narratives creates layer upon layer of an irresistible puzzle of emotions, believes, sympathies and twists. 

The women in the story seem more concerned with getting the details right whereas the men pompously attribute their success to their own grandiosly assumed cunning and superior knowledge or simply to the “roaring optimism of the times” or the claim that “the future belongs to America”. They are no more than priggish narcissists. 

This is a novel which incorporates the source of its inspiration as well as the reflection on and the reverberations resulting of it. In short, this is as much a literary treat as an intelligent reflection on literature and writing itself. This is a work of fiction which openly declares to be a work of fiction and describes how the ficticiousness is achieved and how slippery the concept of truth or trust is. It is also a play with narrative conventions. 

In her memoir Ida reminisces that she learned the trade from other female authors such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers : “These women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world.… They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: The reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted.” This working method Diaz seems to have incorporated, too. 

In its masterful immaculate writing Trust is all about the great American myth of money and how intrinsically close life and money have become entwined. And it makes us aware of how little we perceive or what we can see at all. There is no one truth. In this it is a perfect reflection of our confoundingly complex time. 

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“Loitering with Intent“ by Muriel Spark - review

 “Loitering with Intent” by Muriel Spark:

The novel was first published in 1981 and is Muriel Spark’s 16th novel. It centers around Fleur Talbot, who lives on ''the grubby edge of the literary world'' in postwar London and tries to write and publish her first book, musing upon ''how wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.’’

Fleur has no job and no prospects and little money. She rents a dreary bed-sitting room from a swinish landlord and has an affair with handsome Leslie, the self-centered husband of her friend Dottie. Leslie also has an affair with a male young poet.

Fleur acquires a job as secretary to the Autobiographical Association, the members of which are an eclectic bunch of upper-class twits who meet under the roof and the supervision of Baronet Sir Quentin Oliver to compose their dreary memoirs. 

Then strange and obscure things begin to happen. Fleur starts to notice that the plot of her novel-in-progress seems to presage the activities of Sir Quentin and his pathetic gang. Fiction and reality seem to merge, Fleur's closest friends accuse her of libel and plagiarism, Dottie even steals the only typescript of the novel from her flat. The members of the Association begin to act like the characters in her book and then, as predicted by Fleur's book, they begin to meet untimely deaths.

This is a wise, economic and brilliantly mischievous book, a fine metafictional meditation on the work of writers and the fine line between fiction and reality. Where does art start or reality end?

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“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie“ by Muriel Spark - review

 “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie“ by Muriel Spark:

The novel, published first in 1960, centers on the downfall of the fascinating schoolmistress Jean Brodie who ultimately and tragically will suffer for her hubris. 

Miss Brodie is a passionate, free-thinking and unconventional teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of “special girls“ at Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh in the 1930s. They are the Brodie set and she wants them to be the crème de la crème. The novel’s theme is the education of six distinctive girls and the drama that leads to Miss Brodie’s “betrayal” which results in the dismissal from Marcia Blaine by her great enemy, the headmistress, Miss Mackay. 

Miss Brodie is a complex person, she is narcissistic, excessively self-confident, kind, selfish, considerate, moody and happy all at the same time. With her gift of mysterious glamour and charm she dazzles and seduces her girls, but these qualities lead also to her downfall. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” she boasts, “and she is mine for life.” She needs her girls as an extension of herself to live out missed dreams of her own. 

Like many of her contemporaries in the aftermath of World War I, she found that eligible men were rare. Having lost her first love to the war, Miss Brodie transforms her sexual affection into an affection for her students. In her unconventionality she spins out ever and ever more elaborate tales to them of her dead lover, she insists that Giotto was the greatest Italian artist and Mussolini a subject for adoration. She introduces them to the secrets of cosmetics, visits concerts, ballet and theater performances with them and tries, in short to make them Europeans instead of dowdy little provincial Edinburgh dwellers. Her undisciplined and unstructured pedagogical approach includes unreflected fascism as well as Tennyson. She is a product of her time.

She preaches that art, beauty and goodness should come before philosophy and science. What Miss Brody is looking for is the absolute, an endeavour bound to fail. Although Brodie claims education is “a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul”, she is actually a rigid dogmatist centered in calvinistic thinking.

Miss Brodie has triumphantly entered her "prime." Of this she speaks with such great conviction that to her girls it becomes a great vitality, a visible presence. 

The novel moves back and forth in time. We follow the six girls (Monica, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, and Eunice) of Miss Brodie's "set", all famous for excellency in something, be it mathematics, sex, insight or sport. We follow them from year ten to their eighteenth, but we also get glimpses of their middle age and look back at Miss Brodie from beyond her prime, after her betrayal and finally learn of her death. Gradually we piece together the lastly fateful connection between the domineering teacher and her favourite pupil Sandy who, before she becomes Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, initiates the betrayal that will doom her teacher to an embittered and solitary spinsterly retirement, brooding on who could have betrayed her. She never finds out and dies soon after. 

As much we find fault in Brodies character and convictions, we cannot help but like her. There is lightness as well as dark to Jean Brodie. The point of the novel is not to give solid answers on what is right  and what is wrong. The reader is left with the task to work out a way for himself to deal with moral ambiguity. In this the book, like any great classic, is ageless and pleases and perplexes with every new reading.

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“Await Your Reply“ by Dan Chaon - review

 “Await Your Reply” by Dan Chaon:

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” And what if that story is a lie? 

Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

This entertaining page-turner, focusing on fate, circumstance and family dynamics, is a gripping journey on the quest for identity and a meditation on what is what defines us and what happens when we loose it.

It all begins with a fast-paced gruesome, maybe a little too calculated cliff-hanger chapter that makes you realize right away you’re in for a rough ride. This feeling of unease and lurking threat never leaves. 

The book is composed of three strands of seemingly separate narratives. Their main protagonists are each driven by the desire to become someone else and each have a central need for someone’s unconditioned and complete love.

The first narrative is about Ray, a college dropout who feigns his own death and learns that the man he thought was his uncle and who recruited him for criminal activities involving identity theft, is really his biological father. 

The second narrative is about Lucy, an orphan who runs away from her dreary hometown and life in Ohio with George, her high-school history teacher. 

The third narrative is about Miles who, for almost a decade now, is in search of his twin brother Hayden, a paranoid schizophrenic, charismatic drifter who spent most of his life switching from one identity to the next and occasionally sends messages to his brother but refuses to be found.

For a long time, even though there seem to be similarities and parallels, these narratives don’t intersect until they do and then the novel gains enormous momentum and leads to a finale, stunning in its result and inevitability, as devastating as the opening cliff-hanger chapter of the novel. 

The book is written with an eloquence and grace of style not frequently encountered in the field of page-turners and a joy to read. 

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“Glyph” by Percival Everett- review

 “Glyph” by Percival Everett:

This is a book by Percival Everett which I hadn’t so much fun with as with his other books. It is a satire on poststructuralism that features a sarcastic infant genius, a baby born with an IQ of 475. The baby’s name is Ralph and he is hyper-intelligent, linguistically competent, and has, mostly firmly founded, opinions on almost everything. He reads books of philosophy, science and mathematics. He wisely does not speak but communicates with scribbled, often sarcastic, very insightful notes. He is the son of Eve, a failed painter and Douglas, a failed academic. Ralph introduces his parents with the line "My father was a poststructuralist and my mother hated his guts". 

Glyph could have been a mischievous and very funny satire on poststructuralist thought and literary theory - if there wouldn’t be those endless, tiring theoretical excursions into just this poststructuralism. So the book is only partly funny and I resigned myself to the enjoyment of the plot and story. 

The plot gains velocity when Ralph is abducted by a mad psychologist, after a series of psychological tests have revealed that he is in possession of an incredibly exceptional IQ. From his abductor he is further abducted by the FBI and then furthermore abducted by a well-meaning Mexican guard and his wife. He finally escapes the grabbing pedophilic hands of a catholic priest and makes it back into his mother’s arms. 

In the end the satire appears to develop too many targets and sidelines and sort of eats itself. For example is Ralph not just the narrator of his adventures but also a novelist, who offers up his own "Theory of Fictive Space", a sort of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for novels, which contains a huge list of ideas about the novel (or fiction in general) and fictitious dialogues between historical figures like Socrates, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Zeno, Thales or Wittgenstein, to name a few. It is all very theoretical and thus, while quite interesting and philosophical, even comical, it also becomes tedious. It is a stew of metafictional reflection and enjoyable comedy, which makes it finally a matter of taste, some like it, some don’t. I did partly. 

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