Just as Bevel’s autobiography retells the story of the novel, the memoir guts the autobiography like a still-wriggling fish.
His new entry in that project, “Trust,” is a wily jackalope of a novel - tame but prickly, a different beast from every angle. History has tricked us into revering these men, Diaz suggests, so he will too. In his first novel, the nearly perfect “ In the Distance,” Diaz created the un-Bevel in a mid-19th century Swedish immigrant named Håkan, a man of enormous physical stature and dejected humility who accidentally turns himself into a folk hero. He specializes in plaster busts that look like marble only from a distance. The hollow core of the great man myth is Diaz’s recurring project. As one character explains, “e had no appetites to repress.” He claims in his autobiography, “My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few,” but that implies there is a life to know. His whims flip the markets, demolish industries, control the livelihoods of every creature in this country. Nonetheless, Bevel’s name is engraved in stone on New York institutions and pressed onto the front pages of newspapers. A 6-feet-tall stack of $100 bills dressed in a Savile Row suit, Bevel’s only notable trait is that he’s a schmuck. Andrew Bevel, the elusive Manhattan financier at the center of Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust,” is all story, no substance.
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