Trust, Novel, Hernan Diaz, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, tragedy
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is actually four books in
one. The relationships between the books
- the first book, a Roman á
clef, is followed by a somewhat hackneyed revision and response to the Roman á
clef in the form of an unfinished memoir by the pilloried main character , then
a revelatory memoir by the ghost writer of the revisionist memoir and then a
very brief set of journal entries by the surprise character of interest – is, I
suppose, somewhat like a set of nesting Russian dolls, but the focus of the
books changes across the four books, so the minor character in the first proves
to be, by far, the most interesting, powerful, and enigmatic by the fourth.
The character in the fourth is the wife of the wealthiest of
wealthy financiers – a man known for his uncanny ability to predict the stock
market and seemingly the one person who profited most from the economic
downturn of the Great Depression – and indeed, perhaps and according to some,
the one who caused it.
The style of the first book – the book that tells the tale
of the financier through a thin veil – is sensationalist and gripping. It feels a bit like Citizen Kane, but on the
east coast. The primary characters, the
financier and his wife, are each interesting in their own right and there is a
sense of pleasure at watching the train wreck of their relationship and
realizing that all the wealth in the world could not bring happiness to the
couple. I felt a little superior to them
– as they were caught in the amber trap both of their wealth but also of their
time. They were trapped in their
humongous house on fifth avenue – certainly the equal of the Frick mansion, and
isolated from everything that makes life wonderful. When the wife went mad at the end of this
tale and the husband isolated her in the hospital where her father had died of
a schizophrenic like condition, there was a sense of symmetry to it.
Written in the style of the 30s, the very language seemed to
both reveal but also hide who these people were. The economic genius seemed totally devoid of
the ability to connect meaningfully with others, so his deeply felt but clumsy
attempts to give his wife the best treatment felt almost cruel in his
misunderstanding that she needed, not drugs, but human contact. It seemed to foreshadow the whole Sackler debacle that would play out 50-90 years later, in part because the financier owned
the pharmaceutical company and then he bought the hospital and insisted on the
kind of treatment she would receive.
The financier’s response, an attempt to clear his name, was bloated
and approximate – and he seemed, at best, a pale imitation of the man who was
pilloried in the initial novel. He was
less interesting, crude even, and his genius seemed somehow to be more limited,
when it was observed in the first person, than when he was being
pilloried. The question became, “Can it
be so easy to be a plutocrat?” He seemed
to be inordinately thick and simple minded, and yet we already knew that he was
tremendously successful.
In the third book, we are introduced to the trappings of
power. In retrospect, the powerful plutocrat
decides exactly who should write the book for him and he has the resources to
discover her – especially in the depths of the depression. She is smart but not schooled or knowledgeable
– someone who should be manipulatable.
She is the daughter of a communist – and that weirdly makes her ripe to
take on an uber capitalist and write a hagiography. But he dies before the project is completed,
but not before the ghost writer becomes intrigued by the wife, and by the all
but illegible journal she has kept.
So, the fourth book is that journal, which tells a very
different story – clarifying that it was the wife who was forced to use the
husband as the conduit for her genius, which she exercised both in the stock
market and in the arts – and that she died, not of madness, but of cancer and
the hospital where she died was a medical, not a psychiatric facility.
So, on the face of it, this book is an articulation of the ways
in which women have been overlooked. First
the minor character, a man, who wrote the attack novel missed the central story
by not understanding the role of the wife.
Then the one living person who knew that story, the husband, suppressed
it in an attempt to aggrandize himself and erase his wife from the narrative, an
attempt that failed. In the process of
doing this, he hired a woman who ended up discovering his wife, figuring out
both how to access the telling document and how to decode it for
publication. All hail to the sisterhood! (That all four books are the creation of a
man is an interesting wrinkle on this narrative).
But from a psychodynamic perspective, I think the deeper story is a question of how well known any of us can ever be – not to posterity (certainly a question that is posed here), but to those in our lives who are, or should be, close to us. The wife is the daughter of a man with odd but interesting capacities, and she herself (we piece together after the fact that each of these narrators, each unreliable in their own way, have contributed important as well as distracting information) was a mathematical savant. As a girl, she was a kind of one person freak show, reminiscent of Mozart as a child. Perhaps the one person who might have understood her, her father, became unavailable to her through his madness and then death (again something that we rely on the first narrator to have accurately reported).
She is not understood by her mother – an outgoing person who
uses her as a bauble to attract interest to her parties and to support her
lifestyle of mooching off others. Then
her mother arranges her marriage to an already well – heeled man who would
become fantastically rich but his self-absorption would keep him from getting to know her – ironic
because that self-same absorption left him feeling isolated and lonely.
Part of the pact that allows the wife to earn money for her
husband is that she can never speak of her role in doing that. For this reason alone, none of the artists
that she supports and engages with get a chance to know her and the potential
she has realized. They are appreciative
of her support, but hardly intimate with her.
Her description of her idea about how to cheat the system – one that is
realized by her husband, is lucrative but is more on the crafty side than
indicative of brilliance.
The wife’s description of how she anticipated the stock market
crash that would lead to the great depression and what she did to profit from
that is intimately tied with her thinking about music. It is not unusual for those with great
mathematical ability to have considerable musical aptitude, but her description
of the way music led her to anticipate the crash seems pretty simplistic to me.
Yes, she did see something that others
did not, but in retrospect many have seen it as essentially inevitable.
Was she as overly enamored of herself as her husband was?
I did not set out with this conclusion in mind. What I intended to conclude is that she did
not know herself, in part because she had no relationship with anyone through which
she could discover herself. From this
perspective, the imagined conversations with the psychiatrist, in the first
story – conversations that she seemed to profit greatly from, but that the
ensuing books prove were completely manufactured – might be seen as the
opportunity to know herself, an opportunity that simply never occurred.
I do think that the tragedy that is at the heart of this book
is the failure of the characters to know each other, but also to know
themselves. Whether that is aided and
abetted in both the husband and the wife by the primary attribution error – we assume
that things that we have successfully accomplished are due to our abilities and
those that we have failed at are due to circumstance – and the subsequent
narcissism that can occur when we are extremely successful is operative in the
wife as well as the husband is not a thesis I am willing to defend to the
death, though it may have been something that the author was pondering.
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Im in on book four
ReplyDeleteIt's the one that pulls things together. Hope it is making sense and clarifying that each narrator has contributed both fact and fiction
ReplyDelete