Rask will become a money virtuoso, but he never connects the tunes he plays with any effect they might have on the outside world. Instead, he sees “capital as an antiseptic living thing.” It moves, eats, grows, breeds, gets sick and can die. But it’s clean. … The bigger the operation, the further he was from the concrete details.” Diaz’s own prose keeps its own antiseptic distance, no matter who his narrator is. His fantastic first novel, In the Distance, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is set in the American West during the Gold Rush, and its language creates a world in which both the physical and psychic space seem stretched. Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person. Diaz, on the other hand, relies on a distant one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and emotionless. In both books he reports on the inner lives of his characters rather than dramatizing them, and especially in Vanner’s hands the result reads more like a biography than a novel: a story without dialogue, in which Rask’s life becomes more and more common to us. given in summary rather than in scenes.
It’s a disorienting yet effective way of imagining a character who seems to have almost no inner life of his own, whose very essence lies in anticipating the click of a ticker tape. Yet the rich man eventually discovers that he needs a wife. His choice is a young woman named Helen Brevoort, an American girl from an old Knickerbocker family who grew up in Europe. She is interested in art and philanthropy, and she also has peculiar talents, including a memory so unerring that after a quick glance she can recite from two randomly chosen books at once, alternating them sentence by sentence. But no talent is without its prize, and hers will eventually lead her to a Swiss sanatorium.
So add Henry James to Wharton, and Thomas Mann too. Diaz’s first book was a study of Jorge Luis Borges, and like the Argentine master, he has the entire literary past at his fingertips. “Bonds” sets the tune to which the three other parts of the novel have variations, and I focused on it to avoid spoilers; for much of the novel’s pleasure comes from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises.
Still, I can say that the second volume claims to be a memoir by another financier, the pages full of notes intended to be developed later, and also full of self-disclosure. This man claims he only wanted what was right and right for his country, and that includes his attempt to short the entire stock market prior to the Great Depression. The third and longest part of the book is in the voice of an Italian-American novelist, Ida Partenza, the Brooklyn-born daughter of an anarchist printer: an old woman who now, in her 1990s, tells a story from her childhood that us the entirety of the first two parts of the novel. I won’t say anything about the short fourth story, except that it also revises everything that has come before.