Wealth and Power: Constructing Reality in Hernan Diaz’s Trust
Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Trust is a multi-layered interrogation of American capitalism and its intimate relationship with narrative power. Far from a simple story of moneyed success, the novel argues that immense wealth and power are not merely tools for economic control but are the means by which the ruling class constructs, manages, and ultimately owns reality itself. The wealthy in Trust do not just accumulate capital; they curate history, silence dissent, and transform their own financial gambits into heroic fables. By tracing this theme across the lives of Benjamin Rask and Andrew Bevel, their wives, and the women who document them, Diaz reveals how the fictions of finance and the fictions of biography are woven from the same fabric.
The Ticker Tape and the Abstract Kingdom
The novel’s first section introduces Benjamin Rask, a financier whose power is built on abstraction. After inheriting his father’s fortune, Benjamin moves his office to Broad Street and becomes fascinated by the stock ticker. The evidence shows that he “became adept at reading the ticker tape, finding patterns, intersecting them, and discovering hidden causal links.” For Rask, the ticker tape is not just a tool—it is a portal to a world where money has been stripped of its materiality. He trades in “options, futures, and other speculative instruments,” dealing in claims on value rather than anything concrete. His power lies in this distance: he can “think, speak, and, perhaps, write” and set in motion a living creature of capital that draws “beautiful patterns.” The stock ticker symbolises the transformation of messy human enterprise into clean, controllable data.
This abstract power allows Rask to remain untouched by the consequences of his actions. During the Panic of 1907, he profits while others fail, and he later short‑sells during the 1929 crash, becoming a public villain. Yet his wealth shields him. The text notes that “the recession was, to him, nothing but a healthy bout of fever”. He can afford to see catastrophe as a “lancet applied to an abscess”. His power is the power to experience economic reality as a metaphor, while others endure it as hunger and homelessness. Benjamin Rask becomes a man who “experiences most of what happened in New York through the newspapers—and, above all, through the ciphers on the ticker tape”. The ticker tape becomes his reality; the suffering of others remains a distant abstraction.
The Price of Power: Helen Rask’s Erased Humanity
The contradiction of this power is laid bare in the figure of Helen Rask. Married to Benjamin as a path to her own freedom, Helen instead becomes a target of the public hatred her husband has earned. After the crash, she finds herself “watched” everywhere—stares, scowls, whispers. The evidence describes her terror: “Hate rang in every sound—every horn, every whistle, every scream was a curse.” Benjamin’s power has made her visible, but only as a symbol of greed. Her subsequent withdrawal into seclusion and anonymous philanthropy attempts to atone, but the damage is done. Helen’s mental health deteriorates into eczema, starvation, and obsessive writing in a private language—a desperate attempt to reclaim a narrative that has been stolen from her.
Benjamin, by contrast, remains “thoroughly unmoved by the reality around him”. His wealth insulates him from any moral obligation. When Helen asks to be sent to a Swiss mental institute, it is a final surrender to the power that has consumed her. The novel shows that the power to shape public perception belongs exclusively to the wealthy man; his wife can only try to disappear. The contrast underscores a central claim: the rich control not only markets but also the emotional and reputational costs of their actions, offloading them onto others. Mildred Bevel’s later narrative, titled “Futures,” hints at a similar story of untold suffering, but its gaps also mirror the elisions that wealth can enforce.
Rewriting History: Bevel’s Memoir as a Weapon of Power
The second half of the novel shifts to Andrew Bevel, a financier clearly modelled on Rask but given his own distinct voice. Bevel hires a young writer, Ida Partenza, to ghostwrite his memoir. The memoir section, presented as “A Destiny Realized,” is a masterpiece of self‑mythologising. Bevel portrays himself as a visionary who “bolster[s] the market” during downturns, who helped “steer the official monetary and trade policies,” and whose personal interventions in 1922 “inaugurated a period that had nothing to do with a ‘bubble’ but established the foundations for a future of great plenty.” He presents his wealth as a patriotic service.
Yet Ida’s experience with Bevel reveals the mechanics of his power. In their evening sessions, Bevel insists on a version of events that suits his legacy. He emphasizes his self‑made success and his desire to subtly criticize the president. Most tellingly, he recounts a memory of his wife Mildred retelling detective novels—a scene that Ida recognizes as her own invented story, based on her father. Bevel has appropriated her fiction and made it his truth. This moment exposes the ultimate form of power: the ability to absorb others’ stories and present them as one’s own, rewriting the past to fit a desired narrative. Ida Partenza realises that Bevel is not merely recounting life; he is manufacturing it. The detective novels she and her father loved become a symbol of how people try to solve the mystery of the powerful—only to find that the powerful control the plot.
Bevel’s sudden death from a heart attack, witnessed by Ida in newspaper headlines, seems to cut his story short. But the frozen estate and legal battles that follow show that even death cannot fully contain the power he wielded. The memoir remains unfinished, yet the narrative he tried to impose—the “Legacy” section of his notes, with its grand philosophical pronouncements about “the laws of economy” and “survival”—persists as an attempt to shape how he will be remembered.
Ida’s Father and the Fiction of Money
A crucial counterpoint to Bevel’s vision comes from Ida’s father, a fiercely ideological anarchist. In a long debate reproduced in the novel, the father argues that “money is a fiction; commodities in a purely fantastic form” and that “finance capital is the fiction of a fiction.” He insists that money “represents the divine existence of commodities” and that those who trade in it are “criminals” dealing in illusions. This Marxist critique directly challenges the worldview of characters like Bevel, who see their wealth as real and deserved.
Yet the father is not presented as an uncomplicated truth‑teller. He is an “authoritarian” in his own right, unable to tolerate dissent, treating his beliefs as “mathematical laws.” His radical critique of power is itself a form of power—a closed narrative that permits no challenge. Ida’s relationship with her father involves provoking him, knowing his reaction will be “disproportionate anger” and “stubborn silence.” The blotting paper that appears as a symbol throughout the novel suggests the way both capitalist and anarchist narratives absorb contradictions and leave no trace of dissent.
By placing these two worldviews side by side, Diaz refuses to offer a simple moral. Wealth and power are shown as both destructive and creative, both illusory and brutally real. The father’s claim that “money says nothing about its owner” is partially true, but the novel also shows that having money says everything about a person’s ability to control the world—including the ability to commission a memoir that will say whatever they wish.
Complexity and Contradiction: The Lonely Throne
No analysis of wealth and power in Trust would be complete without acknowledging the isolation that power produces. Benjamin Rask becomes more withdrawn as his reach extends. The text states that “his reticence increased with his reach. The further and deeper his investments extended into society, the more he withdrew into himself.” He attempts to conform to social expectations—building a mansion, hiring a decorator, joining clubs—but these are hollow performances. The mansion at La Fiesolana, referenced elsewhere in the novel, stands as an emblem of a gilded cage.
Andrew Bevel, too, seems to have no true intimates. His final dinner with Ida is marked by his desire to control her narrative, not to connect. His death is announced by headlines, and he leaves behind a contested estate, not a community of mourners. The power that allows these men to shape public perception also ensures they are fundamentally alone. The novel thus complicates any simple celebration or condemnation of wealth: it is a force that dehumanises the wielder as surely as it oppresses the subjects.
Study Questions and Answers
Q1: How does the stock ticker function as a symbol of power in the novel?
A1: The stock ticker represents the transformation of concrete economic activity into abstract data, which the wealthy can read and manipulate from a distance. For Benjamin Rask, it becomes his primary means of engaging with the world, allowing him to profit without acknowledging human consequences.
Q2: In what way does Andrew Bevel’s memoir reveal the relationship between wealth and narrative control?
A2: Bevel hires Ida Partenza to ghostwrite a memoir that casts his financial manipulations as patriotic service. By rewriting events and even appropriating Ida’s fictional scene about detective novels, Bevel demonstrates that the wealthy can purchase not only assets but history itself, shaping how they will be remembered.
Q3: What happens to Helen Rask as a result of her husband’s power, and what does her fate reveal about the theme?
A3: Helen becomes a target of public hatred for Benjamin’s actions, leading to her withdrawal from society, mental illness, and eventual confinement. Her fate shows that the costs of elite power are often borne by those closest to the powerful, particularly women, who are denied the right to control their own narratives.
Q4: How does Ida’s father’s Marxist critique of money complicate the novel’s treatment of wealth and power?
A4: Her father argues that money is a fiction and that finance is a “fiction of a fiction,” offering a radical critique of capitalist power. However, his authoritarian, closed-minded manner shows that ideological opposition can also be a form of dominance. The novel thus suggests that both capitalist and anti‑capitalist narratives can be tools of control.
Q5: What does the novel suggest about the limits of wealth and power?
A5: Despite their vast resources, characters like Benjamin Rask and Andrew Bevel are deeply isolated and unable to form genuine relationships. Bevel dies suddenly while his memoir remains incomplete, and his estate becomes entangled in legal disputes. The novel suggests that wealth can shape reality but cannot conquer mortality, love, or the truth that will eventually be uncovered by persistent narrators like Ida.