Since Hernan Diaz’s debut novel appeared a few years ago, the writer, who was born in Argentina in 1973 and lives in New York, has been considered a great hope in contemporary American literature. Not only, but also because with “In the Distance”, published in 2017 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, he immediately dealt with the paradoxical emergence of American myths of origin: the Californian west in the gold rush days, created half as a Bildungsroman, half as a work on the shimmering myth of freedom.
In his novel “Treue”, which is now being published in German, Diaz now addresses another myth of American origins: that of the beginnings of late capitalism and the glittering seductions of the New York financial world in the early 1920s. Now that alone, after a brief look at American literature in the 20th century, would not be worth mentioning in and of itself – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” or Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” are special literary variations on the topos of finance and fiction .
In recent years, however, in a postmodern counter-movement, the American novel itself has undergone a kind of capitalization, albeit with rather sparse results. For a long time, recent criticism, put forward by Zadie Smith or Mark Greif, has been based on the motto that American literature shows a clear dichotomy: realism or avant-garde; Both together seemed impossible, not least because of the profit maximization strategies of the corporate publishers, which, according to the thesis of those nineties, had virtually abolished the independent publishers and with them the authors and their non-commercial ideas.
“Treue” skilfully undermines all such expectations of the novel: not so much in its consistently mannered to almost overly polished language as in its form. The original English title refers to this more clearly than the staid-heavy German “Treue”: “Trust” means trust and trust on the one hand, and the financial investment company on the other that of inventions.
Loyalty is divided into four chapters, unfinished manuscripts that tell different versions of the story of a Wall Street businessman and his wife in the years leading up to the Great Depression. In Commitments, Harold Vanner’s rumored best-selling novel, a financial mogul makes a fortune during the 1929 stock market crash while his wife dies of mental illness far away in Switzerland. “My Life” is a kind of autobiography by Andrew Bevel, who in turn served as a model for the mogul in the previous chapter, who in turn is contrasted by the diaries of his wife Mildred. There is also the “Memoirs Remembered” by Ida Partenza, who in turn is said to have written Bevel’s autobiography as a ghostwriter.
The individual chapters are written in a somewhat conventional manner, as if the film adaptation were already being considered, which is now actually to be made soon on HBO: the lonely billionaire and the big crash, the power man’s self-defense and avoidance of blame in contrast to the suddenly destroyed lives of small investors, the balls and dinner parties. “Loyalty” only unfolds its actual art when you overlook the reference to Gatsby and take a look at the form.
Taken together, the accounts of the billionaire couple vary in reliability, and why the fictional chapter writers write them only becomes apparent in retrospect. The novel can therefore be understood as a meta-commentary on the question of what actually constitutes reality, when it is appropriate to have trust in something and when that trust is perhaps coldly disappointed; Again and again, what appears in each of the chapters is varied: “Someone had twisted reality.”
To Hernan Diaz’s credit, he didn’t turn his text full of old-money figures like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford into the somewhat expected historical novel critical of capitalism, but rather a much more ambiguous play on the allure of the financial world as a site for alternative perspectives on the world reality, including its failure.
American critics celebrated “Loyalty” in a somewhat moralizing way for the fact that the novel recognizes “the human cost of great wealth, even if its characters cannot see beyond their own calculations,” as the “New York Times” wrote, and then immediately Hernan Compare Diaz to Edith Wharton, to Henry James, yes, even to Thomas Mann and Balzac. However, these exaggerated comparisons do Hernan Diaz an injustice – his artistry in the construction of a form just as they do not take his language in its somewhat frozen perfection quite seriously. Which in a novel that is so much about interpreting reality and its stories like this one almost seems like a trick from a Diaz novel.
Hernan Diaz: Loyalty. Translated from the English by Hannes Meyer. Hanser Berlin. 416 pages, 27 euros