Trust - Despite the title we meet four unreliable narrators.

 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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