Once again, Diaz makes the most of his formidable gifts. Grounded in history and formally ambitious, this succeeds on all fronts. Yet there are other versions of this tale of. The result is a kaleidoscope of capitalism run amok in the early 20th century, which also manages to deliver a biography of its irascible antihero and the many lives he disfigures during his rise to the cream of the city’s crop. This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. The reader eventually hears from Mildred directly via her journal, discovered by Ida during her research and included as a coda. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. The third story-within-the-story is the most significant in it, the reader meets Ida Partenza, daughter of an Italian anarchist in exile, who, in pursuit of her own writerly ambitions, suppresses both her own conscience and the suspicions of her suitor, Jack, to become Bevel’s secretary and coconspirator in ruining Harold Vanner, as Ida concocts a counternarrative of a saintly Mildred. Hernan Diaz’s trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one anotherand in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Bevel responds by undertaking a memoir, which only serves to highlight his own touchiness and lack of imagination. The novel, published shortly before Bevel’s death, infuriates the magnate, particularly for its depiction of Bevel’s deceased wife, Mildred, as a fragile madwoman.

It is also a book within a book, within a book within a book four distinct sections that each claim to tell the. First there is Bonds, a novel by controversial writer Harold Vanner, which tells the story of Benjamin Rask, a character clearly based on Bevel. Hernan Diaz’s Booker-longlisted second novel, Trust, is a book about money. Diaz returns after his Pulitzer finalist In the Distance with a wondrous portrait in four texts of devious financier Andrew Bevel, who survives the Wall Street crash of 1929 and becomes one of New York City’s chief financial barons before dying a decade later at age 62.

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