Once it settles us in this milieu, however, Trust starts to strip it down to its foundations. “With perverse symmetry,” goes its gossipy narrator, “as Benjamin rose to new heights, Helen’s condition declined.” Its first book, “Bonds”-a salacious page-turner about a successful 1920s financier named Benjamin Rask and the mysterious illness and death of his wife, Helen-works like an act of narrative seduction, luring readers into the velvet-draped world of the 1 percent. Trust begins like a fairly conventional bourgeois novel that portrays the rich interior lives and domestic spaces of the elite ruling class. Read: The paradox of caring about ‘bullshit’ jobs

And it deftly illustrates how stories about the nation’s exceptionalism are inextricable from the circulation of money. Trust is an audacious period piece that-over the course of four acts, each framed as a “book”-seeks to undo the hardened conventions undergirding myths about American power. It begins with the lead-up to the Wall Street stock-market crash of 1929, following the sublime booms and busts of economic history from the vantage point of individual people. Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust, takes the challenge of narrating the entanglements of modern-day capitalism head-on. How does one even begin to capture its contortions?

The challenge of writing about the shadowy system behind the “evil capitalist,” though, remains. The world of industry and finance-and its long reach into our lives-has only grown more complex since Marx’s day.

Look around today and it’s not hard to see capital’s life-sucking forces still at play: We sense them in tech companies’ profit motive, in the exploitation of migrant labor, in Amazon’s economic and physical domination. But, as Karl Marx once put it, the evil capitalist “is only capital personified.” Far more chilling, he wrote, are the workings of capital itself, which, “vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Writing about that, as he knew firsthand, was much more difficult. Stories about American capitalism tend to have a recognizable villain: the robber baron, the business tycoon, the financial investor, your boss.

Hernan diaz in the distance