Monthly Archives: June 2023

TRUST No One – Except Billionaires. You Can TRUST Them

For economic reasons, you should buy Hernan Diaz’s TRUST. It’s four stories for the price of one. For enjoyment reasons, you should also read it.

The novel, which won Diaz the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, asks one question: Who is Mildred Bevel? Four related stories offer answers, but Mildred is different in each. So which one do you trust?

Bonds, the first story, is written by Harold Vanner, a novelist who may have been a friend with benefits. But Vanner obfuscates, because Bonds is about Benjamin and Helen Rask – fictional characters based upon Andrew and Mildred Bevel. In Vanner’s account, Benjamin Rask is a brilliant, amoral Wall Street financier in the early 1900s, and Helen is a kind and generous arts patron who has serious psychological issues.

The second story, My Life, is dictated by Andrew Bevel. He wants to tell his story because a “vicious circle has taken hold of our able-bodied men: they increasingly rely on the government to alleviate the misery created by that same government, not realizing that this dependency only perpetuates their sorry state of affairs.” Mind you, this is during the Great Depression and Andrew is stupendously rich, but the only person he pities is himself. If you have confused him with Andy Rand, Ayn Rand’s dickhead brother, you are forgiven.

Andrew is also offended by Vanner’s portrait of Mildred (disguised as Helen). But mostly, Andrew is outraged by Vanner’s description of him (disguised as Benjamin). He wants to correct the record in an outrageously self-serving and mean-spirited way. To Andrew, Mildred is a saintly woman who dabbled in music and philanthropy. She is no master of the financial universe like him.

The third story is A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza. Ida writes this in 1981 after the Bevels are dead. She’d been hired decades earlier by Andrew to transcribe his memoir (the rebuttal to Vanner) and improve upon it – a euphemism for make shit up.

She sees through Andrew’s self-aggrandizement and makes some informed judgments about Mildred. Her goal is to turn Mildred’s “tenuous ghost into a tangible human being”, but all she has to work with is Mildred’s mostly empty notebooks, Andrew’s self-absorbed account from 50 years earlier, and Vanner’s novel. To Ida, Mildred was a “thoughtful, disciplined philanthropist.”

Finally, in the last installment, Futures, we hear Mildred’s voice. She sees herself quite differently. It’s a refreshing perspective, but is it true?

TRUST succeeds on several levels. It’s absorbing historical fiction. It’s also a brutal examination of how immense wealth enables the super-rich and powerful to “align and distort” reality to their liking. In that sense, it’s not historical at all.

So, considering all the competing narratives, who was Mildred Bevel really? It all depends on who you trust. Me? I always trust the billionaires.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Dry Cleaned

It's a coffee-spilling day
despite my desperate need
for every drop that drips
on my formerly pristine 
dry-cleaned white shirt.

The sun hasn't risen yet.
The bundled-up homeless are still asleep
under the bridge as I drive by.

It's a middle-management day -
where dire budgets are discussed
behind softly closed doors
and layoffs loom.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

Vanishing Act

Many things vanish in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, including an entire town in Louisiana. However, the plot revolves around twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, and how one of them (Stella) vanishes. Not through foul play but simply because she can. Actually they both vanish at first. One comes back after 14 years, but the other doesn’t. This is getting confusing. I better start over.

In Mallard, Louisiana, no one marries “dark”. The town’s founder was a freed slave who had a white father. He built a town for people like him – people “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” After several generations the Mallard folks are light skinned. “But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant white men could kill you for refusing to die.” That’s what happened to the twins’ father. He was lynched when they were young children. They saw him dragged out of the house.

The story opens in 1968. The twins have been gone 14 years when Desiree walks into town pulling a 7 or 8 year old girl. The town is shocked because the child is not light skinned. She’s “midnight”. The twins had run away to New Orleans and found jobs, but then Stella realized how easy it was for her to pass as white. Soon after, she vanishes. Desiree eventually moves to Washington, D.C. and marries a physically-abusive man. They have a daughter, Jude. When Desiree concludes her husband is likely to kill her, she vanishes again – returning to Mallard with Jude.

Vanishing is not the same as escaping. “You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.” They were wrong.

Similarly, passing is not the same as being. “At first, passing seemed so simple . . . But she was young then. She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.” The story spans several decades – from the 1950s to 1988, and eventually Stella does turn up. When she does, her past is waiting.

The story is an intriguing examination of what a person gives up when she decides to become someone else. Given the time’s overt racism, Stella’s highwire act has real risks. Which leaves the reader asking: considering everything she sacrifices, was “vanishing” worth it? It’s to Bennett’s credit that the reader struggles for an answer.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor