Good Reads: Made Of Money
“Trust”, the new novel by Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner prize finalist, Hernan Diaz, is at once both original and classical. Either way, it’s a surprising, unexpected read.
Billed as a “literary puzzle”, the book’s daring premise is to present readers with an unraveling narrative experience — a multi-layered story within a story. You methodically unwrap it, revelation after revelation, until the answer is finally exposed.
The story centers on a wealthy Manhattan couple during the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression. It begins with the engrossing feel of an Edith Wharton novel. A reclusive magnate meets a brilliant daughter of a bankrupt aristocratic family. It’s reminiscent of the Whartonesque start of Hanigihara’s latest “To Paradise” and its distinct books within a book. Though “Trust” is historical fiction, Diaz builds characters and a world surrounding them, so authentic, I Googled their names to see if they existed. (They did not.)
Benjamin and Helen Rask, a legendary couple of privilege, their marriage, their fortune; separating fact from fiction is the essence of the reader’s challenge. Constructed with multiple narratives with conflicting versions and shifting origin stories for this family, you will start wondering, what is the true story?
Like the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, wealthy tycoons who amassed immense fortunes are attractive fodder for dramatic mythmaking. The author says the novel’s central concern is “money’s ability to shape and warp the realities around it”, or “bend and align reality”. For this story’s tycoon, wherein “Wealth had, for him an almost transcendental dimension”, money is used to make perception become reality.
“Trust” explores the larger contrasting actualities of the American Dream, and the lack of equal access. Here, the aristocrats have status and mansions, but for those without, and struggling with inequality — women and immigrants — the allure of wealth is still bedazzling. Ida, the daughter of an Italian immigrant who is hired as an eccentric financier’s memoirist, has an intense early encounter when her new employer sends a limousine for her, “That evening, however, in Bevel’s car I experienced, for the first time, the cool rush of luxury.’ I did not just witness it. I felt it. And loved it.” Later she becomes conflicted with her own ambitions and potential complicity — pressured to tell the story her employer presents against the desire to parse out the truths.
Whether it’s a person or a nation, the book engages the reader with questions about identity. What’s history versus myth? Diaz’s cleverly composed and affecting novel makes a human and socioeconomic declaration: Wealth has the power to control lives. But, when the impact of that wealth is a betrayal of trust, then, that is a price too high to pay.
Unlike “Trust”, there is nothing subtle about Eliza Jane Brazier’s “Good Rich People”. This is a raucous thriller with a macabre battle between the haves and the have-nots. It calls to mind the perverse motivational premise of last year’s wildly popular streaming series, “Squid Game”, where the wealthy enjoy making desperate people play dangerous games for money.
A destitute woman is drawn into a situation she mistakenly believes she can leverage to escape her poverty. Instead, she’s caught in a secret game devised by a bored wealthy couple for sport. Played out in their Hollywood Hills mansion, unsuspecting guests are challenged to survive bizarre games of psychological warfare.
Despite all the advantages afforded by their wealth, here the privileged are soulless, disturbed villains. They channel their disdain for the poor into sinister conspiracies to destroy their lives. The latest game pits two women against each other, one, overly attached to her wealth, the other, homeless with nothing to lose. Will there be a winner in the final fight of, and for, their lives? How far will they both go to win?
This twisted thriller makes a biting comment on wealth disparity. At turns, it’s funny, at times, cruel, and overall, brazenly over-the-top. Money may not be the root of all evil, but it sure is here.
