A book of four books

A book of four books, a time of turbulence, a world to be jarred between two wars: one bloody blow had already sunk, another looming. But this is a different battlefield, where the Great Ship of finance rocked, and then wrecked, made mountains of money for a few, lost and purged for all others.

In the invisible center of all, stood a tycoon (Andrew) and his wife (Mildred). Their stories were told and retold, altogether four times.

It begins with a novel: “Bonds” by Vanner where Andrew and Mildred are the actors. To which Andrew declared a war right after (the autobiography “My Life”, him and Ida the ghostwriter). There and elsewhere, he welded his power to bend reality to (his) fiction. Mildred, who came the last, fills a diary with sporadic sparks and slanted inks; words were bell tolls with wings to chase one another, but left in between unsung gaps too wide and often too dark. She calls her version (the 4th book), fittingly, “Futures”. Ida had skewed access to the stories of all three, developed her own penetrating ideas (the 3rd book “A memoir, Remembered”). Yet it is not to be done in one scoop; the coda came some fifty years later.

Trust, Bonds, Futures: instruments in the world of finance, the most treasured in the world of men and women. In the book of four books, words wore different masks.

Oddities like Andrew and Mildred, in my line of work, are called “out of distribution samples.” They are owners and makers of outsized stories, so out of proportion that the sense of mystery arises because no one ordinary lens can cover them all. So, the question becomes, which versions in “Trust” do we trust?

Of the central characters, it’s Mildred that I found the most mysterious. Marginalizing her to the norms of the time says much more about the ugliness of Andrew than of Mildred; this is almost by definition. Then I cannot decide which one is more cruel: the lone genius that succumbs to mental illness but nevertheless beamed out rays of kindness and warmth (by Vanner), or the lone genius that doesn’t seem to care much of anything, other than edgy art and artifacts, including the financial devices she so deftly used (her diary). What, exactly, took her life? Mystery remains.

Then there are the two writers. Vanner left no trace, before and after the novel; Andrew had made sure of that. It’s the existence of this single novel that he cannot tolerate and has to battle upfront (and this is what Ida is hired for). Ida is sensible, clever, and brave. The Mildred by Vanner and Ida of herself share a warm and touching undercurrent of father-daughter, played out twice. So the stories will fold forward; generation after generation.

Amazing amount of complexity so masterfully controlled, and only his second book!