Ida Partenza in Trust: The Ghostwriter Who Unraveled a Financial Empire

Overview

Ida Partenza is the central consciousness of the second book within Hernan Diaz's Trust. A twenty‑three‑year‑old woman from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, she is hired as a ghostwriter by the titan of finance Andrew Bevel. Tasked with producing a memoir that would refute a scandalous novel about Bevel and his late wife, Ida gradually uncovers the lies underpinning Bevel’s empire and begins to construct a truer account of the people who moved within it. Her voice – sceptical, shrewd, and quietly rebellious – serves as the reader’s guide through the novel’s examination of narrative, power, and the fragility of female agency.

Plot Role

Ida’s function in the narrative is twofold. On the surface, she is Bevel’s amanuensis: she takes dictation, shapes his recollections, and adds a “feminine touch” to the portrait of his wife Mildred. In practice, she becomes the secret historian of the Bevels. She reads Harold Vanner’s novel Bonds, visits the mansion, interviews the housekeeper, and discovers a blotting paper covered with Mildred’s backward handwriting – physical evidence that contradicts both Bevel’s sanitised version and Vanner’s gothic portrait. Ida’s role is to expose the distance between official story and lived truth.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Ida is driven by economic necessity and intellectual curiosity. She grew up in a railroad apartment with her father, a Italian‑born anarchist printer whose income was meagre. She taught herself bookkeeping and typing from library books and worked a string of temporary jobs. The $200 weekly salary Bevel pays her lifts her family out of immediate debt and allows her to buy a typewriter and new clothes. Yet she never simply takes the money. She negotiates to sit on the sofa rather than at a desk, she asks probing questions about Mildred’s intelligence, and she continues to read Vanner’s novel despite Bevel’s erasure campaign. Her core trait is a determination to understand the truth – not for revenge, but for the same reason she loved detective novels as a girl: stories impose order on chaos, and false stories must be corrected.

Chronological Arc

Ida’s story in Trust follows a clear trajectory. She begins in the first chapter of the second book as just another applicant in a long line of women waiting for a secretarial job. She adopts a false name and fabricates an autobiography. After passing a brutal typing test, she is summoned to Bevel’s office, where he admits he knows her real identity but hires her anyway. She reads Bonds and feels an immediate kinship with Helen (the fictionalised Mildred). She begins her ghostwriting sessions, first meeting Bevel at his mansion, then later in an apartment he rents near his own home. Jack, her boyfriend, steals her discarded pages and attempts blackmail; Ida exposes him and forces him to leave town. She discovers her father has also stolen pages – a draft of Bevel’s memoir – confirming that even those closest to her are entangled in the web of trust and betrayal. The arc concludes with Bevel’s sudden death from a heart attack. Ida continues editing his memoir even as his estate is frozen, and she takes a job as his private secretary. The final pages of the second book reveal that the “Mildred Bevel” section that follows is not Bevel’s autobiography but the true story Ida has pieced together. Her arc moves from subservience to hidden authorship.

Relationships

Andrew Bevel: The central professional relationship. Bevel treats Ida as a tool – someone who will bend reality to match his mistakes. He spies on her father, offers her an apartment to control her proximity, and demands that she fabricate domestic anecdotes about Mildred. Yet Ida pushes back: she questions his need to pulp every copy of Vanner’s novel, and she secretly preserves the evidence of Mildred’s hidden life. Their dynamic is one of unequal but subtly reciprocal dependence.

Ida’s father: The most emotionally complex bond. Her father is an anarchist who despises Wall Street and refuses to adapt to the linotype. He prints elegant invitations while resenting them, and he insists on being called an exile. Their relationship is marked by silences, mockery, and a shared love of language. He steals her drafts, not out of malice but from a mixture of suspicion and a need to understand her world. When Ida moves out, he gives his blessing with unexpected tenderness. Ida later discovers that Bevel incorporated her father’s mannerisms into his fictional memory of Mildred – a strange fusion of the two men she serves.

Jack: Ida’s boyfriend, an aspiring newspaperman. He brings her father beer and listens to his stories, but he is jealous of her success. He steals her discarded pages and plans to sell them. Ida bribes his agent to scare him out of town. The relationship ends when Jack flees to Chicago, and Ida feels relief rather than grief.

Mildred Bevel: Though they never meet, Ida is deeply connected to Mildred. She identifies with her, feels anger at Vanner for making Mildred go mad and die violently, and eventually discovers that Mildred’s rooms contain heavily annotated books in multiple languages – evidence of a intellectual life neither Bevel nor Vanner acknowledged. Ida’s search for Mildred becomes the heart of her narrative mission.

Key Decisions and Consequences

1. Adopting a false name: Ida applies as Mildred Prentice, a prospective version of herself. The decision allows her to get the job, but it also places her inside a fiction from which she must later extract herself.

2. Reading Bonds despite Bevel’s wishes: This reading gives her a framework for understanding the Bevels that is independent of Bevel’s propaganda. It also fuels her anger and her commitment to finding the truth.

3. Fabricating a second story for the blackmailer: When extorted, Ida writes a fictional account of Bevel’s life and leaves it for Jack to steal. The consequence is that she learns how easily narrative can be weaponised, but she also keeps Bevel’s true secrets safe.

4. Moving into Bevel’s apartment: She accepts Bevel’s offer of a furnished flat, which controls her proximity to her father’s political activities. The decision deepens her entrapment but also gives her the space to work undisturbed.

5. Preserving the blotting paper: She takes the purple‑ink blotter from Mildred’s room as evidence. This act ensures that a record of Mildred’s hidden life survives, and it becomes part of the “Futures” section.

Theme and Symbol Connections

Ida’s story embodies the novel’s central themes of narrative and truth. She is a ghostwriter – someone who lends her voice to another’s story – but she gradually reclaims that voice for herself. Her father’s typesetting and her own typing are described as parallel crafts: both distort time and reveal the world reversed, a metaphor for how memory and narrative invert lived experience. The wealth and power theme is present in every interaction she has with Bevel; his ability to hire her, spy on her, rent an apartment, and pulp novels illustrates how capital controls both material reality and the stories told about it. The theme of marriage and intimacy appears through Ida’s investigation of Mildred’s life. Bevel idealises Mildred as a domestic angel; Ida discovers a woman who wrote in a private language, annotated books in French, German, and Italian, and expressed a desire to be sent to a mental institute. Ida’s own relationships with Jack and her father are also marked by failed intimacy and hidden agendas. The symbol of the inverted truth – the backward writing on the blotter, her father’s anarchist pamphlets printed upside down – recurs throughout her arc, reinforcing the idea that the official story must be read against the grain.

Five Book‑Specific Questions and Answers

1. Why does Ida Partenza adopt the alias “Mildred Prentice” when she applies for the job at Bevel Investments?
Ida invents the name for the compulsory one‑page autobiography. The name “Mildred” is borrowed from Bevel’s wife, and “Prentice” suggests a raw apprentice. The alias is a strategic performance: she blends genuine desires with conventional ambitions in order to pass the test and gain entry to a world that would otherwise be closed to her.

2. How does Ida’s background as the daughter of an anarchist printer shape her approach to ghostwriting?
Her father taught her that money is a fiction and that the printed word carries both truth and subversion. She understands that typesetting and typing are acts of reversal – in typesetting, the letters are set backwards; in ghostwriting, the truth is often inverted to serve the employer’s interests. This awareness allows her to see through Bevel’s narrative and to recognise the political implications of her own labour.

3. What does Ida discover in Mildred’s private rooms, and why is that discovery important?
Under the pretext of seeing the greenhouse, Ida convinces Miss Clifford to show her Mildred’s suite. She finds starkly modern rooms filled with heavily annotated books in multiple languages, plus a blotting paper covered in backward purple ink. The discovery undermines both Vanner’s and Bevel’s narratives: Mildred was neither a stereotypical madwoman nor a childlike domestic saviour. She was an intellectual whose hidden writing seems to have articulated a version of her life that neither man could allow.

4. Why does Ida decide not to tell Bevel about the young man who threatens to deport her father?
Ida is afraid that Bevel will assume she has broken her non‑disclosure agreement and will destroy her and her father. She also realises that Bevel is ruthless enough to have sent the man himself as a test. Her silence is a survival calculation: she decides to create a fiction for the extortionist, just as she fabricates Bevel’s voice for the autobiography, thereby retaining control of what each party learns.

5. In what ways does Ida’s relationship with Jack reflect themes of class and betrayal?
Jack is a struggling journalist who resents Ida’s sudden financial independence. When he sees her pay cash for a typewriter, his jealousy surfaces. He steals her discarded pages and tries to sell them to a newspaper. Ida’s response – bribing his agent to run him out of town – shows that she has learned the logic of the market even as she tries to subvert it. The betrayal reveals that trust, in a capitalist society, is a negotiable commodity, especially across class lines.

Explore the novel’s broader themes and see how Ida’s narrative connects to the ending explained. For more on character and symbolism, visit our pages on wealth and power, narrative and truth, marriage and intimacy, mental illness and institutionalization, and capital and abstraction. If you have lingering questions, our questions and answers page may help.