There are tons of books that overtly or covertly pathologize people engaging in unconventional relationship-styles and sexual behavior – and yes, I’ve spent many years educating myself to be able to oppose those, at least in my head, in a sophisticated and intellectually honest way. That was a necessary survival strategy, especially as a woman raised in a dogmatic religious household and then, as an adult, navigating these subcultures. Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. The third section (and easily the strongest of the book) is written by Ida Partenza – the daughter of an Italian anarchist effectively in America as a political refugee – she is hired by Revel to write the second part of the novel as a counterbalance to the sensationalist impact of the first (which he and everyone else regards as his lightly fictionalised biography). While researching the book (to the limited permitted by Revel who wishes to tightly control the narrative) Ida finds that neither Vanner or Revel’s portrayal of Mildred seems to meet the complexity of her character but is unable to discover the true Mildred. Parts of this section are narrated closer to our present day as the now elderly Ida visits a museum made of the Revel home (where she wrote her book) and explores the archives. So you’d be forgiven for seeing this as Neil doing a very public mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But that’s not what’s going on. CP Snow famously wrote an article/lecture/essay book on the chasm that had opened between the cultures of arts and science – in my view (and as someone with a foot in both camps) there is a similar divide now between the worlds of literary fiction and finance. If you can find someone in finance who reads they are likely to read non-fiction books with possible some genre fiction – and similarly few literary fiction books even cover finance. Of those that do many seem to misunderstand it (for example confusing the direction of interest rate change impacts) – and even my book of 2022 Natasha Brown’s “Assembly” uses banking as a canvas on which to focus a social mobility/meritocracy lens on the topic of colonialism and its lasting impacts (eg we do not know what job the unnamed narrator does for her bank – just her seniority).

What he did, essentially, was a staging of his immature, narcissistic phantasies under the disguise of a seemingly egalitarian, conscious relationship construct. In fact, the most uncomfortable, most cringe-inducing segments of this book were part of his exploration of “alternative” relationship styles in the third part. In the end I was dragged down by the dull-sludge sections, and unable to make more excuses for this novel and its disappointments. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

Select a format:

proposition in this period, see Sullivan and Johnston (2018).) 1.1.2 The neo-classical correspondence theory If you don’t want to be addicted to sex, read this book. If you don’t want to feel like ever having sex again, read this book. It’s at your option to be charitable and credit Strauss for showing the unrewarding nature of addiction but, at best, he overshoots the mark and leaves you wondering how our species managed to continue to reproduce.

This isn’t to say that the artful construction and structure of the book belies it’s claims to authenticity. There’s really not a moment where you feel that Neil is being untruthful or trying to polish up his image or excuse his past excesses. If anything, it feels painfully honest to a fault - even a little self-pitying at times; the phrase “I’m not the hero of this book, I’m the villain” echoes over and over through the narrative. This actually annoys me. While yes, I do have the benefit of being the detached outside observer, the fact is that there really aren’t any bad guys here. Yes, people get hurt, sometimes hurt badly… but it’s not out of malice or even self-absorbtion. What you see in The Truth are people who are well-meaning and well-intentioned but ultimately wrong for each other; square pegs convinced that they should be round and believing that if they try hard enough or find the right angle, they’ll finally fit into that round hole. The novel's conceit relies on the first section, Bonds, being a novel that I can imagine people wanting to read in 1938. I couldn't imagine it. It feels fusty and restrained and underdone. It has no sustained emotional depth. It reads more like a long encyclopedia entry about the Rasks. I didn't believe it was interesting or important or revealing enough to be a novel that the 'real' Benjamin Rask, Andrew Bevel, would bother to care about.

The Hearth Book Break Down.

There’s a saying: the path to wisdom is along the road to excess. And God knows Neil goes to excess here. After breaking up with his girlfriend and leaving sex addict rehab, Neil decides to pursue ethical non-monogamy and - as in The Game - dives in head first, visiting polyamory conferences, swingers parties, play parties and kink salons and - not surprisingly - having a lot of sex. Like, Caligula-levels of sex at times. There is some useful information earlier in the book while Neil was in therapy at the addition centre and then towards the end of the book there is a brief paragraph on various different therapies and resources the author tried which left me wanting a lot more information. That leads me to an overall impression, that crept up in the beginning and was solidified over time: The structure of Trust might be a good place to begin a cursory investigation of what makes this novel so extraordinary. On its face, Trust tells the story of a wealthy financier and his rise to outrageous monetary heights during the Great Depression of 1929. What follows might have been, in any other novel, a straightforward narrative, like a hammer to a nail: the archetypical tale of the American Dream that highlights the individualism and determination of the “self-made” American man. Diaz, however, fractures that story instead, spilling it across multiple genres: a novel, a memoir draft, a memoir, and finally, a diary. By the time we think we know what the story is about, the frame has already shifted, and the story has become something else. And then something else again. And then something else again. With each turn of the frame, a new angle of glare is revealed. In other words, the frames are not decorative—they are borne out of necessity. They rise out of a deeper silence, and make possible sounds that could not otherwise be articulated. The frames speak against erasure.