He conceals Mildred’s superior intelligence, and the role she played in expanding his business, and would rather remember her as someone barely touched by life. His autobiography is straight out of Ayn Rand, speckled with self-serving maxims (“personal gain ought to be a public asset”) and condescending remarks about his wife’s philanthropy (“Generosity is the mother of ingratitude”).
A contemporary reader wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he thinks making a quick buck over generations is his family’s manifest destiny.
You’re propelled forward by the twists and turns of the novel’s form, the conviction that Diaz has another trick up his sleeveĪndrew is a run-of-the-mill capitalist in many ways, morbidly focused on the pure fantasy of money. “Commodities in a purely fantastic form.” What is money?” he would mutter to himself. When Ida was growing up in Brooklyn, her single father, a proud anarchist, would often point to the imposing Manhattan skyline across the river and insist that it was all a dream. Bonds could refer to either monetary instruments or familial attachments a future is both a preemptive financial contract and something that “tries… to become the past”. Even the manuscript titles feel like lexical interventions.
The novel’s Rashomon-like structure is buttressed by Diaz’s astute grasp of the ways in which we reliably deceive ourselves, which in turn is compounded by the book’s central obsession: the creepy similarities between the worlds of fiction and finance. The Bevels’ competing narratives are mediated by a long postmortem memoir, written by Ida Partenza, once the gullible ghostwriter of Andrew’s book. The first few pages of Futures, the scribbled diaries of Andrew’s wife, Mildred, have been randomly ripped out. My Life is the partial autobiography of Andrew Bevel, clearly the model for the tycoon in Bonds, strewn with half-finished chapters and paragraph outlines. In Bonds, ostensibly a bestselling novel authored by one Harold Vanner, a monkish mogul manages to make a massive windfall during the 1929 stock market crash while his wife tragically succumbs to mental illness far away in Switzerland. H ernan Diaz’s second novel, Trust, is a collection of four manuscripts at different stages of completion, and they tell different versions of the story of a Wall Street businessman and his wife in the years leading up to the Great Depression.
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