Hthe second novel by ernan diaz, Confidence, is a collection of four manuscripts in 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. In Bonds, ostensibly a bestselling novel by a certain Harold Vanner, a monastic tycoon manages to make a huge windfall during the stock market crash of 1929 while his wife tragically succumbs to mental illness in Switzerland. My Life is the partial autobiography of Andrew Bevel, clearly the model for the tycoon in Bonds, peppered with half-finished chapters and paragraph sketches. The front pages of Futures, the scribbled diaries of Andrew’s wife, Mildred, have been torn out at random. The Bevels’ competing narratives are mediated by a long postmortem memoir, penned by Ida Partenza, once the gullible ghostwriter of Andrew’s book.
the novel RashomonStructure similar to this is reinforced by Diaz’s astute understanding of the ways we reliably deceive ourselves, which in turn is compounded by the book’s central obsession: the eerie similarities between the worlds of fiction and finance. Even the titles of the manuscripts seem like lexical interventions. Bonds can refer to monetary instruments or family ties; a future is both a precautionary financial contract and something that “tries… to become the past.” When Ida was growing up in Brooklyn, her single father, a proud anarchist, often pointed to the towering Manhattan skyline across the river and insisted it was all a dream. “Money. What is money?” he mumbled to himself. “Commodities in a purely fantastic form.”
Andrew is an ordinary capitalist in many ways, morbidly focused on the sheer fantasy of money. A contemporary reader would not be surprised to learn that he thinks making a quick buck for generations is the manifest destiny of his family. His autobiography is straight from Ayn Rand, peppered with self-serving maxims (“personal benefit must be a public good”) and condescending remarks about his wife’s philanthropy (“Generosity is the mother of ingratitude”). He hides Mildred’s superior intelligence and the role she played in expanding her business, preferring to remember her as barely touched by her life. He asks twentysomething Ida to imagine some tender moments between him and Mildred and include them in My Life. One night at dinner he recounts these scenes to Ida, as if they had really happened.
But Confidence It’s not just the story of an obscenely rich man who lies and seeks power. Diaz’s genius lies in gradually revealing that just as concrete goods and human labor are transmuted into tradable stocks and for-profit commodities, novelists like Vanner transform a real-life cancer diagnosis into a psychiatric ailment because they make it in a more fascinating story. Time itself has the effect of obscuring some inconvenient truths and embellishing others. Decades after Andrew’s death, Ida returns to her mansion, now a museum, not so much to find out how she manipulated the stock market during the crash, but because she still hasn’t figured out who Mildred really was. She discovers that Vanner was a regular guest at Mildred’s dinner parties, and that they even corresponded when Mildred was undergoing cancer treatment in a Swiss sanatorium: “I should tell her about the crackpots here!” Is Mildred the secret author of Bonds? We can only speculate.
Vanner and Andrew frequently make general assessments. They might attribute someone’s financial success to the “roaring optimism of the times” or triumphantly claim that “the future belonged to America.” Women, on the other hand, seem more concerned with getting the details right. On her first visit to the Bevel Investments headquarters, Ida notices that the huge building blocks the sun from the surrounding streets. Mildred throbs with “terrifying freedom” once she realizes her illness is terminal. Confidence is the rare novel that incorporates both its source material and the afterlife. The plot contours may seem familiar at times, but you are propelled forward by the twists and turns of the novel’s form, the conviction that Diaz has another trick up his sleeve. Years after her ghostwriting days, Ida reports that Bonds’ only copy of her is in tatters, that the novel is now a collection of three or four loosely bound pamphlets: “I think this fragility becomes the book.”