Diaz Influences
According to sources, Hernan Diaz has listed some of his primary literary influences as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Karl Marx.
Karl Marx is of course the German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He's best known for The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and for Das Kapital.
Rather than a simple description of capitalism as an economic model, Das Kapital instead examines capitalism as an historical epoch and a mode of production, and seeks to trace its origins, development, and decline.
Marx argues that capitalism is a form of economic organization which has arisen and developed in a specific historical context, and which contains tendencies and contradictions which will inevitably lead to its decline and collapse.
The Gilded Age
Virginia Woolf is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
She also experimented with other literary structures that provided alternative perspectives. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, such as A Room of One's Own (1929).
Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by mental illness, institutionalized several times, and attempted suicide at least twice. Her illness was characterized by symptoms that would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, although diagnosis and treatment were not available at that time. She was also socially introverted, distant, and quiet.
She is possibly a model for the character of Helen Rask. Writer Vita Sackville-West (the inspiration for Orlando) worked tirelessly to lift Woolf's self-esteem, encouraging her not to view herself as a quasi-reclusive inclined to sickness who should hide herself away from the world.
Her modernist style, including stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, past and present, and others, very possibly influenced Diaz.
Edith Wharton
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton was an American writer and designer who drew upon her insider's knowledge of upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.
In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928, and 1930.
The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel that tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the end of the 19th century. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."
The House of Mirth
Literary reviewers and critics at the time categorized it as both a social satire and novel of manners. It underscores the frivolity of a social set that not only worships money, but also uses it ostentatiously solely for its own amusement and aggrandizement.
Wharton figured that no one had written about New York society because it offered nothing worth writing about. But that did not deter her as she thought something of value could be mined there. If only the writer could dig deep enough below the surface, some "stuff o' the conscience" could be found. Which is what she did.
[I]n spite of the fact I wrote about totally insignificant people, and 'dated' them by an elaborate stage-setting of manners, furniture and costume, the book still lives and has now attained the honor of figuring on the list of the Oxford University Press. . . . Such people always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities and it seemed to me the fate of the persons embodying these possibilities ought to redeem my subject from insignificance.
The House of Mirth
Introduction to 1936 edition, The House of Mirth
The central theme of The House of Mirth is essentially the struggle between who we are and what society tells us we should be. Thus, it is considered by many to be as relevant today as it was in 1905.
If its sole subject had been the excesses and lives of the rich and famous, by themselves, it is doubtful it would have remained popular for as long as it has. The House of Mirth continues to attract readers over a century after its first publication, possibly due to its timeless theme. That the life and death of Lily Bart matters to modern readers suggests that Wharton succeeded in her purpose: to critique "a society so relentlessly materialistic and self-serving that it casually destroys what is most beautiful and blameless within it."
The Age of Innocence
This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, pushing out Sinclair Lewis for Main Street. She was the first woman to win the prize.
The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.
The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness.
Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York society, it never develops into an outright condemnation of the institution. The novel is noted for Wharton's attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, as well as for the social tragedy of its plot. Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she had lived in that world and had seen it change dramatically by the end of World War I.
The Age of Innocence
The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward machinations.
It is believed to have been drawn from the popular painting "A Little Girl" by Sir Joshua Reynolds that later became known as "The Age of Innocence" (though Reynolds himself never called it that; the title was given by the engraver Joseph Grozer in 1794), and was widely reproduced as the commercial face of childhood in the later half of the 18th century.
The title, while ironic, was not as caustic as the title of the story featured in The House of Mirth, which Wharton had published in 1905.
PBS—American Experience—the Gilded Age
During the "Gilded Age," every man was a potential Andrew Carnegie, and Americans who achieved wealth celebrated it as never before. In New York, the opera, the theatre, and lavish parties consumed the ruling class' leisure hours. Sherry's Restaurant hosted formal horseback dinners for the New York Riding Club. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish once threw a dinner party to honor her dog who arrived sporting a $15,000 diamond collar. While the rich wore diamonds, many wore rags.
In 1890, 11 million of the nation's 12 million families earned less than $1200 per year; of this group, the average annual income was $380, well below the poverty line. Rural Americans and new immigrants crowded into urban areas. Tenements spread across city landscapes, teeming with crime and filth. Americans had sewing machines, phonographs, skyscrapers, and even electric lights, yet most people labored in the shadow of poverty.
To those who worked in Carnegie's mills and in the nation's factories and sweatshops, the lives of the millionaires seemed immodest indeed.
PBS—American Experience
An economist in 1879 noted "a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution." Violent strikes and riots wracked the nation through the turn of the century. The middle class whispered fearfully of "carnivals of revenge."
For immediate relief, the urban poor often turned to political machines. During the first years of the Gilded Age, Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall provided more services to the poor than any city government before it, although far more money went into Tweed's own pocket.
Corruption extended to the highest levels of government. During Ulysses S. Grant's presidency, the president and his cabinet were implicated in the Credit Mobilier, the Gold Conspiracy, the Whiskey Ring, and the notorious Salary Grab.
Europeans were aghast. America may have had money and factories, they felt, but it lacked sophistication. When French prime minister Georges Clemenceau visited, he said the nation had gone from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence — without achieving any civilization between the two.
Gilded Age--Britannica
The Gilded Age is a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in U.S. history during the 1870s that gave rise to important novels of social and political criticism. The period takes its name from the earliest of these, The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. The novel gives a vivid and accurate description of Washington, D.C., and is peopled with caricatures of many leading figures of the day, including greedy industrialists and corrupt politicians.
Gilded Age--Britannica
The great burst of industrial activity and corporate growth that characterized the Gilded Age was presided over by a collection of colorful and energetic entrepreneurs who became known alternatively as “captains of industry” and “robber barons.” They grew rich through the monopolies they created in the steel, petroleum, and transportation industries. Among the best known of them were:
John D. Rockefeller (oil)
Andrew Carnegie (steel)
Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads, shipping)
Leland Stanford (railroads)
J.P. Morgan (financier, banker, industrial consolidation).
John D. Rockefeller
An American business magnate and philanthropist, he has been widely considered the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history.
Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870, ran it until 1897, and remained its largest shareholder. His wealth soared as kerosene and gasoline grew in importance, controlling 90% of all oil in the US at his peak.
Oil was used throughout the country as a light source until the introduction of electricity, and as a fuel after the invention of the automobile. Furthermore, Rockefeller gained enormous influence over the railroad industry which transported his oil around the country.
Standard Oil was the first great business trust in the United States. Through use of the company's monopoly power, Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and, through corporate and technological innovations, was instrumental in both widely disseminating and drastically reducing the production cost of oil.
John D. Rockefeller
Rockefeller's company and business practices came under criticism. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil must be dismantled for violation of federal antitrust laws. It was broken up into 34 separate entities, which included companies that became Exxon Mobil, Chevron Corporation, and others—some of which still have the highest level of revenue in the world.
Consequently, Rockefeller became the country's first billionaire, with a fortune worth nearly 2% of the national economy. His personal wealth was estimated in 1913 at $900 million, which was almost 3% of the US gross domestic product (GDP) of $39.1 billion that year.
That was his peak net worth, and amounts to $26.6 billion (in 2022 dollars; inflation-adjusted).
Cornelius Vanderbilt
During the 1850s, Vanderbilt took an interest in several railroads, including the Erie Railway, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Hartford and New Haven, and the New York and Harlem (popularly known as the Harlem).
In 1863, he took control of the Harlem in a famous stock market corner, and was elected its president. He later explained that he wanted to show that he could take this railroad, which was generally considered worthless, and make it valuable. It had a key advantage: it was the only steam railroad to enter the center of Manhattan, running down 4th Avenue (later Park Avenue) to a station on 26th Street, where it connected with a horse-drawn streetcar line. From Manhattan it ran up to Chatham Four Corners, New York, where it had a connection to the railroads running east and west.
Once in charge of the Harlem, Vanderbilt encountered conflicts with connecting lines. In each case, the strife ended in a battle that Vanderbilt won. He bought control of the Hudson River Railroad in 1864, the New York Central Railroad in 1867, and the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway in 1869.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
He later bought the Canada Southern as well. In 1870, he consolidated two of his key lines into the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, one of the first giant corporations in United States history.
In 1868, Vanderbilt fell into a dispute with Daniel Drew, treasurer of the Erie Railway. To get revenge, he tried to corner Erie stock, which led to the so-called Erie War. This brought him into direct conflict with Jay Gould and financier James Fisk Jr., who had just joined Drew on the Erie board.
They defeated the corner by issuing "watered stock" in defiance of state law, which restricted the number of shares a company could issue. But Gould bribed the legislature to legalize the new stock. Vanderbilt used the leverage of a lawsuit to recover his losses, but he and Gould became public enemies.
J.P. Morgan
John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age.
As the head of the banking firm ultimately known as J.P. Morgan and Co., he was the driving force behind the wave of industrial consolidation in the US spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Over the course of his career on Wall Street, Morgan spearheaded the formation of several prominent multinational corporations including U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric. He and his partners also held controlling interests in numerous other American businesses including Aetna, Western Union, Pullman Car Company, and 21 railroads. Due to the extent of his dominance over U.S. finance, Morgan exercised enormous influence over the nation's policies and the market forces underlying its economy. During the Panic of 1907, he organized a coalition of financiers that saved the American monetary system from collapse.
As the Progressive Era's leading financier, Morgan's dedication to efficiency and modernization helped transform the shape of the American economy. Adrian Wooldridge characterized Morgan as America's "greatest banker." When Morgan died and his son inherited, his fortune was estimated at $80 million (equivalent to $2.4 billion in 2022).
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
"The True History Behind HBO’s 'The Gilded Age'"--Julian Fellowes’ new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City’s old and new monied elite.
“The important word is gilded,” Fellowes tells Entertainment Weekly. “... [T]hat tells us it was all about the surface. It was all about the look of things, making the right appearance, creating the right image.”
Even though the United States had boomed in size in the decades since its founding, daily life for most Americans remained largely unchanged by 1860.
Homes had no electricity or running water. People cooked with fire, read by candlelight, and rode in carriages or on horses. (Those traveling long distances would be lucky to board one of the brand-new railroads that had begun to crisscross the nation.)
Slavery, though hotly contested, was still legal, and women’s legal identities were subsumed by their husbands upon marriage under the system of coverture.
Hardly anyone went to college, and most people lived out their relatively short lives within a few miles of where they were born.
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
By the time those born around the time of the Civil War—like social reformer Jane Addams, three-time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan and their peers—came of age, nearly every aspect of their world had changed.
Between the 1870s and the dawn of the 20th century, Americans witnessed revolutions in daily life, from what they wore to how they traveled to where they resided to how they spent their leisure time.
As the so-called Gilded Age took shape, transformations in technology, culture and politics ushered in modern America, for better and for worse.
Mark Twain, who coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel of the same name, used it to describe the era’s patina of splendor—gilded, after all, is not gold—and the shaky foundations undergirding industrialists’ vast accumulation of wealth.
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
Though “The Gilded Age” is largely fictional, its characters’ experiences aptly reflect the reality of late 19th-century urban living. And no place better underscores Gilded Age wealth and inequality than New York City.
In the 1880s and 1890s, city leaders extended rail lines and neighborhoods; improved infrastructure; installed underground electric and telegraph lines; built new parks; and erected the historic monuments that have since come to symbolize the city, including the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb and the Washington Square Arch.
But city planners’ aspirations often contrasted with the abject poverty that characterized life for the majority of New Yorkers. The construction of Central Park, for instance, involved displacing 1,600 lower-class residents and an entire African American community known as Seneca Village.
Debates about the ethics of wealth, poverty and labor animated public discourse.
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
In 1886, economist Henry George ran for mayor of New York on the United Labor Party ticket and garnered unprecedented support for a third-party reformer. George’s popularity stemmed from his best-selling 1879 book Progress and Poverty, in which he lambasted economic inequality and corporate wealth.
As an antidote, he proposed a land value tax on all private property, the vast majority of which was held by corporations and the uber-rich, so that corporate profits would be reinvested in the public good. He polled second in the 1886 mayoral race, ahead of Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt.
The theme of wealth inequality resonates especially today, when the top 1 percent of Americans hold more wealth than the entire middle class combined. According to Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the show’s historical consultant and co-executive producer, “there is a palpable connection between this show and 2022 and thinking about how wealth is achieved, how it is safeguarded, how it is inequitable, and . . . who gets to live lives that are charmed, at least financially.”
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
Fans of “Downton Abbey” and its post-Edwardian England setting may expect “The Gilded Age” to provide a nuanced look at the upstairs-downstairs dynamics of wealthy households. But domestic service differed sharply in the U.S., in large part because of the intergenerational effects of slavery.
Most domestic servants in the northeast were Irish immigrants or people who had formerly been enslaved and their descendants. Domestic service remained the most common, if least desirable, job for women of color until the mid-20th century. By 1900, one million women worked as domestic servants. Male and female servants alike absorbed the era’s myths about shoeshine boys who became millionaires—an archetype popularized in Horatio Alger’s best-selling Ragged Dick novels.
In the 1880s and 1890s, says Dunbar, these servants experienced a transition in how they viewed their work. Being “in service” was no longer considered “a lifelong career”; instead, the historian notes, servants began to look around and wonder “why can’t I have a piece of this pie?”
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
As economic lines blurred, racial lines hardened. The Gilded Age witnessed the collapse of Reconstruction, the hardening of legal segregation and the rapid growth of the Ku Klux Klan. But as Dunbar points out, the post-Civil War era also gave rise to the Black elite and middle class—people “who really are . . . absent from film and television” depictions of the period. “The Gilded Age” provides a vibrant portrait of an array of Black citizens’ experiences in New York. While most of the show’s characters are fictional, the series does feature a few actual historical figures, including journalist T. Thomas Fortune.
Fortune (played by Sullivan Jones) was born enslaved in Florida in 1856. He briefly enrolled at Howard University before moving in 1879 to New York City, where he became the most influential Black newspaperman of the era. As the editor of the New York Age, Fortune wielded his platform to fight racism, segregation and lynching. In 1887, he organized the National Afro-American League, a precursor to the NAACP, to defend Black communities against white mob violence. “By looking in particular at the Black elite of this time period,” Dunbar explains, the show “gives us an entry way into people who were one, maybe two generations removed from slavery . . . and who [would soon confront] the very real issues of the color line.”
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
After the Civil War, colleges and universities faced with a greatly diminished number of tuition-paying young men began opening their doors to women, who also found jobs as teachers, secretaries and nurses.
Because it was illegal for married women to formally work outside the home (such laws were only reversed in the mid-20th century), spinsterhood became an increasingly acceptable and appealing option. Many of the nation’s leading women, including suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, remained single in order to devote themselves to their work.
Out of necessity, most married Black women continued to work outside the home. The era’s most prominent Black women—such as Mary Church Terrell, founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, and Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist—raised families of their own while maintaining successful careers and public lives.
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
According to Dunbar, Gilded Age mothers and grandmothers grew up in a completely different time and “could not connect to . . . the future” as it was unfolding for their daughters, granddaughters and nieces. Women of [the younger] generation had a handful of role models; substantially more options than their mothers; and the historic opportunity to, in Dunbar’s words, “ask what is it that is actually going to take to make me happy.”
Constants for women across both generations were the sexual double standard and the inequalities inherent in marriage. Young men were encouraged, then as now, to “sow their wild oats.” Young women, in contrast, were expected to remain chaste until marriage or face dire, lifelong consequences.
With limited access to divorce and few long-term career options, a woman’s most impactful decision remained whom to marry. As women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued, traditional marriage was akin to “legalized prostitution.” So long as women could not be economically self-sufficient or attain divorce, according to Stanton, the difference between wives and prostitutes was one of degree, not kind.
Smithsonian, January 20, 2022
On the surface, the characters appear to be fighting over party invitations and fashion. In truth, however, they are struggling to determine who will shape modern America.
The Gilded Age witnessed record inequality and modernization, but it was also a time when Americans began to join together to fight for reforms that would temper the power of corporations and shore up democracy, including limits on hourly labor, votes for women and civil rights for Black Americans.
While “The Gilded Age” is meant to entertain, the show’s main themes resonate with today’s most pressing concerns. In addition to a great story, as Dunbar notes, the show provides viewers with the opportunity to think about and “wrestle with very real issues around distribution of wealth, around race and gender inequality.”
Gilded Age--Britannica
The political novels of the Gilded Age represent the beginnings of a new strain in American literature, the novel as a vehicle of social protest, a trend that grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the works of the muckrakers and culminated in the proletarian novelists.
Metafiction
Metafiction is a self-conscious literary style in which the narrator or characters are aware that they are part of a work of fiction. Often most closely associated with postmodern prose, metafiction involves a departure from standard narrative conventions, in which a self-aware narrator infuses their perspective into the text to create a fictional work that comments on fiction.
The main purpose of metafiction is to highlight the dichotomy between the real world and the fictional world of a novel.
Using metafiction allows authors to create an added layer to a fictional work, forming an unconventional literary experience for readers.
Metafiction
Metafiction is often distinguishable by a few key characteristics:
Breaking the fourth wall: Breaking this boundary between writer and reader blurs the lines between real life and fiction. Metafiction often directly addresses the reader, openly questioning the narrator’s own story.
Self-reflexive: Authors use self-reflexivity, or self-consciousness, to reflect on their own artistic processes, drawing the audience’s attention away from the story and allowing them to question the content of the text itself.
Experimental: Metafiction is often experimental in nature, fusing a number of different techniques together to create an unconventional narrative. Metafiction can also experiment with the role of the narrator and their relationship to the fictional characters in the story.
Metafiction
Metafiction emphasizes its own narrative structure to remind the audience that they are reading a fictional work. It is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and directly or indirectly draws attention to fiction as a created artifact.
It's a tool frequently used to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality.
Metafiction became particularly prominent in the 1960s, with works such as Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and Willie Master's Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass.
Metafiction
These developments were part of a larger movement which, from the 1960s onwards, reflected increasing social and cultural self-consciousness. It stemmed from, as Patricia Waugh puts it, "a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience in the world."
As a result, an increasing number of novelists rejected the notion of rendering the world through fiction. The new principle became to create through language a world that does not reflect the real world.
Language was considered an "independent, self-contained system which generates its own 'meanings.'" Thus, literary fiction, which constructs worlds through language, became a model for the construction of "reality" rather than a reflection of it.
Reality itself became regarded as a construct instead of objective truth. Metafiction thus became the device that explores how human beings construct their experience of the world.
See Elizabeth Strout. We read Olive Kittredge (short story cycle), but her other books include My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Again.
Metafiction
Although metafiction is most commonly associated with postmodern literature in the mid-20th century, it can be traced back to much earlier works, such as:
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387),
Don Quixote Part Two (Miguel de Cervantes, 1615),
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne, 1759),
Sartor Resartus (Thomas Carlyle, 1833–34), and
Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847).
Examples
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part Two
In 1615, Miguel de Cervantes published a second part to his Don Quixote, which had appeared ten years earlier in 1605 (the two parts are now normally published together). Cervantes produced the sequel partially because of his anger at a spurious Part Two that had appeared in 1614 written by Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda.
In Cervantes’s Part Two, several of the characters are assumed to have read Part One, and are thus familiar with the history and eccentricities of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In particular, an unnamed Duke and Duchess are delighted at meeting the pair they have read about and use their wealth to devise elaborate tricks and practical jokes playing on their knowledge. For example, knowing from Part One that Sancho dreams of becoming governor of a province, they arrange for a sham governorship of a village on their estate.
At one later point, Don Quixote visits a printing house where Avellaneda’s book is being printed and the protagonists encounter a character from that book, whom they make swear that the Quixote and Sancho in Avellaneda’s book are imposters.
Examples
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759 ff.
Excerpt:
It is with LOVE as with CUCKOLDOM—
But now I am talking of beginning a book, and have long had a thing upon my mind to be imparted to the reader, which if not imparted now, can never be imparted to him as long as I live (whereas the COMPARISON may be imparted to him any hour of the day)—I'll just mention it, and begin in good earnest.
The thing is this.
Of the several ways of beginning a book which is now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
Examples
In this scene Tristram Shandy, the eponymous character and narrator of the novel, foregrounds the process of creating literature as he interrupts his previous thought and begins to talk about the beginnings of books.
Through the lack of context to this sudden change of topic (writing a book is not a plot point, nor does this scene take place at the beginning of the novel, where such a scene might be more willingly accepted by the reader) the metafictional reflection is foregrounded.
Additionally, the narrator addresses readers directly, thereby confronting readers with the fact that they are reading a constructed text.
Examples
Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder
British mystery novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz took a highly metafictional approach to his series of satirical murder mysteries that began with The Word is Murder in 2018.
Horowitz casts himself as a modern-day Dr. Watson who is hired by a brilliant but enigmatic ex-Scotland Yard man named Daniel Hawthorne to chronicle Hawthorne's cases. Alongside the mystery plots, Horowitz mixes anecdotes about his own professional and personal life as a TV writer living in London.
Examples
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), John Fowles
This historiographic metafiction novel features a love story between a gentleman and a governess in the Victorian era. But it also includes a narrator who becomes part of the story and offers several different ways to end the novel.
And then there's The Woman in the Library with its layered plots and epistolary emails from Leo at the end of each chapter who reminds us that we're reading fiction.
Trust—structure
Trust is a book spun from four narratives:
Bonds: a Novel by Harold Vanner, tells the story of Andrew Bevel, a financial baron during the 1929 stock market crash
My Life: Andrew Bevel is his attempt to write his own story,
Then A Memoir, Remembered, by Ida Partenza, his secretary
and finally, Futures, the journal left by his deceased wife, Mildred.
Plot summary
Bonds:
Benjamin Rask is a prestigious American financier from a family of financiers. In middle age, he meets the youthful Helen, a prodigy who has spent most of her life in Europe. The two marry and while they are not in love they form a mutual respect.
Helen devotes herself to philanthropic work, supporting musical artists.
During the Wall Street crash of 1929 the Rask fortune is untouched. Numerous friends believe that Rask manipulated the market and turn on the Rasks.
Helen becomes ill, with a mental disorder similar to her father's, and is sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Benjamin accompanies her, overseeing her care, while managing his investments in the pharmaceutical company offering treatments. He allows her to undergo an early form of shock therapy, which kills her.
Plot summary
My Life
Andrew Bevel, an American financier, begins to write his autobiography focusing on his family of financiers because he recognizes himself in the character of Benjamin Rask.
He credits his marriage to Mildred, an even-tempered woman, to much of his success and describes small ways in which she helped make his home more domestic.
Mildred is eventually diagnosed with cancer and dies.
Further into the text the writing becomes degraded with editorial notes to eventually return and expand the text.
Plot summary
A Memoir, Remembered
Ida Partenza reveals that at 19, with her father no longer able to financially support them, she underwent a bizarre series of interviews that led her to become Andrew Bevel's ghostwriter. Bevel was infuriated by the novel Bonds, written by Harold Vanner, which clearly was influenced by his own life.
Ida takes the job but becomes increasingly intrigued by Mildred, whom Bevel describes in demeaning terms but who was clearly an intelligent and sophisticated woman.
Before the work on the memoir is finished, Bevel dies and Ida goes on to become a secretary and later a novelist. In her 70s, researching Mildred, she discovers an uncatalogued diary belonging to Mildred and steals it.
Plot summary
Futures
Mildred Bevel, confined to a sanatorium, details her last days before cancer takes her. In her notes Mildred reveals how her husband initially gave her a small sum with which to play the stock market which did better than his own stocks.
The two began to collaborate with Andrew playing a forward facing role while Mildred made the decisions. Andrew eventually grew resentful and manipulated the stock market on an off-hand comment Mildred made leading to a break between the two.
Due to Mildred's cancer the two eventually reunite. Mildred feels peace at the possibility of her death and notes that Andrew seems more concerned about himself.
Next Week
Trust, Hernan Diaz