Trust “triangulates between Brooklyn, downtown Manhattan, and the Upper East Side,” Diaz says. Despite the best intentions of elites, the public square sprawls relentlessly around them. By contrast “old” money is “more akin to treasure,” inherited, divorced from labor.
And while the math and sociological reality of capital are immensely complicated, there’s a mystical quality to it which is deliberate.” Capital is associated with “new” money, something you grow, transaction by transaction, at the expense of others. “The book had to have an enigmatic quality, probing forces that control our lives and yet we don’t understand them. “The inner workings of making money are arcane,” Diaz says. His research parted the curtain on a high-stakes world alien to most of us while evoking its mystique and glamor. He unearthed the kind of discourse that enriches Trust, from riffs on tariffs and tax cuts to insurgent nationalism. The story was necessarily prismatic, necessarily mediated.” As a New York Public Library Cullman fellow, Diaz steered clear of weighty academic tomes, gravitating instead to industry journalism from the 1920s and ‘30s, among them the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Barron’s. “Vast fortunes are made by invisible multitudes to narrate Trust from a monolithic point of view seemed wrong. Capital, no.” Alternating perspectives was critical to the novel’s structure. “I wanted to write a novel about wealth and capital, about the process of accumulation of capital,” Diaz tells Oprah Daily, noting that very few novels have directly engaged with these ideas: “Class, yes. “They did not exist except as wives and secretaries-it was enraging and intriguing in equal measure.” Characters and readers alike circle Bevel and the money and social standing that allow him to forge his own myth. “What role did women have in that world?” Diaz asks rhetorically.
Ida is secretly conflicted by the origin of her own success, which brings her back, decades later, to the long-dead Bevels. Bevel turns to his secretary, Ida, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, to shape his memoir on the page, a springboard to her own eventual career as a writer. Trust explores the many facets of the enigmatic financier Andrew Bevel and his marriage to Mildred, a secluded spouse with hidden talents. Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month With These Reads.
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