I initially didn’t want to read this book because I got it confused with Trust Exercise, which I didn’t like. This book is very different and I loved it so much!
It’s difficult to say what exactly this book is about because it’s about so many different things. It’s about money, wealth, and who gets to tell their own story.
If you’re not already familiar with this book, on the surface it’s about a very wealthy man who attains astronomical wealth in the 1920s and ‘30s by trading in the stock market. But I would argue it’s really about his wife because the whole book revolves around her.
The book is divided into four sections and they all tell essentially the same story but in very different ways. The first section is a novel within a novel about a fictional wealthy couple who are very clearly based off Diaz’s fictional wealthy couple, Andrew and Mildred Bevel.
Andrew takes umbrage with the book’s portrayal of him, but especially the portrayal of his wife. Because he’s ridiculously wealthy, he sets out to destroy the author of the novel. He buys a controlling stake in the publishing company that published the novel. Then he bought all the copies of the book he could find and had them all destroyed.
One character, Ida, talks about how his wealth allows him to bend reality to his liking, and that’s exactly what he does over and over again.
Destroying the author and his book aren’t enough for him. He also wants to publish his own memoir to counteract the version of his life the author published.
The second section of the book is a draft of his memoir, and that was my least favorite section of the book. I breezed through it as quickly as I could, and according to Diaz, that was his intention, which I found interesting.
The third section is told from the perspective of the woman who was hired to ghostwrite his memoir for him.
Her story is fascinating because her father is a communist and an anarchist who fled Mussolini’s Italy to America. He’s a typesetter who doesn’t make enough money to support himself and his daughter, so she applies for a job working for Bevel without even knowing what the job is. She just needs something that pays the bills.
She gets paid more money than she’s ever seen in her life and also gets a glimpse into Bevel’s world, which is fascinating.
It’s in this third section of the book that we learn the most about Bevel. He says he wants to correct the narrative around his wife, but he doesn’t paint much of a picture of her for Ida, even though Ida is supposed to be writing about her. Instead he says some vague things about how domestic and kind she was and tells Ida to fill in the blanks using her “feminine touch.” Ida basically has to make up stories about Mildred, but in the course of her research, she learns that Mildred was much more than the two-dimensional picture her widower is painting of her.
Instead, Bevel’s memoir becomes all about himself and his vindication of how he built his wealth. Specifically it’s a vindication of how he was one of the only people to make money off the crash of 1929. Of course this leads to people claiming he caused the crash, but he insists he did everything he could to support the American economy during the downturn. Instead he blames the mobs of hobby investors and government overregulation for the crash. Which is hilarious because the crash came about largely because there was no regulation. That didn’t happen until afterwards.
The final section of the book is Mildred’s journal from the final weeks of her life, and that’s when everything comes to light, so I won’t spoil it.
A minor spoiler is that Mildred does die of cancer when she’s only in her 30s or 40s, but in the novel within a novel the fictional author has her die of mental illness and that’s what Bevel (and Ida) really takes umbrage with. That he “reduces her” to a rambling maniac, as if dying of cancer is somehow more noble.
On the one hand, it’s true that there’s a long history of male authors writing female characters who go mad, and that is problematic. On the other hand, I’d really like to see society get to a point where someone suffering from mental illness is treated the same way as someone suffering from cancer.
That said, I was very impressed with Diaz’s portrayal of women in this book. If I hadn’t known it was written by a man, I would have sworn it was written by a woman because of all the ways it shows women being smothered and taken advantage of by the men in their lives. It’s very rare that I say that about a book written by a dude.