Overall thoughts on the book:
I enjoyed the book. The structure of the book is interesting and made the book more memorable. I don’t know that I would want to read a lot of books with the structure of this book, but it was a good book. I don’t think I’d read it again, but I would recommend it to certain people.
More details on the book and lots of spoilers:
Trust is organized in an interesting way. Rather than being a story about a woman who partially ghost writes the autobiography of a gilded age business man in New York City, it’s a collection of four stories (parts) that revolve around the same storyline. That doesn’t sound very clear, let me explain.
So the first part is a fictional novel about a business man in the 1920s in New York City. Benjamin Rask is smart and comes from a somewhat wealthy family, but his family is small so he is very much alone in New York. Helen is from an old New York family. Her family’s name is old, but they are about to run out of money, so her family needs her to marry well. Obviously, Benjamin and Helen marry. It seems that they have a happy but quiet marriage. Helen always makes sure to have the right people over to their house and to host the right parties. She enjoys music and the arts so they have artsy people in their house all the time. When the crash of 1929 happens, all of New York City turn on the Raskes because they are getting richer when everyone else is getting much poorer. Losing her friends is hard on Helen and she gets sick. They end up leaving New York for a mental hospital in Switzerland. In the hospital, Helen dies a very painful death. Benjamin had allowed some experimental treatments to be tested on Helen. They were painful and she died. He went back to New York.
The second part is an unfinished autobiography of a man named Andrew Bevel. This unfinished work is full of edits and notes. It seems that the story is generally the same as the novel in the first part but the names are different. The wife’s name is Mildred. Mildred is noted as being just the perfect, quiet, seen-but-not-heard housewife. The timeline is the same, it starts in the 1920s and ends in the 1930s. As this work is unfinished there isn’t much to say about it. It is about a husband and wife who get along fine. Andrew is wealthy and gets wealthier. There is an emphasis on the charities that the Bevels support and how all of the Bevels throughout history have amassed their fortune through works that have helped and have built up the country. But it is much the same story. As a reminder, this whole book is fiction. Because of the way it’s written, I had to look it up while reading.
The third part is about a woman, Ida Partenza, who is hired to ghost write the autobiography of Andrew Bevel. I thought her life was entertaining. I kinda just wanted the whole book to be about her, but I digress. She is raised by an Italian immigrant father. Her father has very strong political beliefs and is involved in anarchist groups in Brooklyn (I think it was Brooklyn – I’ve already returned the library book, so I’m doing this on memory). Ida becomes a typist for Andrew Bevel and is instructed to write his autobiography. This is obviously the autobiography that makes up the second part of the book. Through Ida’s interviews with Andrew, it becomes apparent that Andrew needs his story to be told because everyone in New York believes that the novel in the first part of the book is about him and people are saying bad things about him. He wants to put an end to rumors. Ida’s story is super interesting, she has a boyfriend who causes problems in her life. She gets nervous that someone in her father’s anarchist group is following her because of her connection with a gilded age millionaire. She moves out of her dad’s house. Honestly, I just think that the story should be her story.
The fourth part is the diary that Mildred Bevel kept while in the hospital in Switzerland. In this diary, we find out that Mildred was smart. Seemingly much smarter than her husband. She says that she understood the stock market well and gave her husband instructions for what to do. The only times that the couple really got along were when she was giving him advice. They did all they could to make it seem like the decisions were Andrew’s and Andrew tried to convince everyone (especially in the autobiography) that Mildred was just a perfect housewife. The diary was kind of hard to read, mostly because it was the writing of a dying woman who couldn’t write much and was sick so much that she didn’t write every day.
Final thoughts:
I love that someone wrote a book with the structure that this book has. It’s a structure that I’ve never seen before and I enjoyed being able to read such a different type of novel. That being said, I think I would have loved the story so much more if it had just been the story of Ida. Through Ida’s thoughts and conversations, we could have learned all of the information from the other three parts. There even could have been snippets of the other writings. The story would have been more enjoyable if written in a normal format, but the format that it was laid out in was more thought provoking.
Bayous and Books 