This was an easier read. I flew through it (20250427-20250503). It was still quite enjoyable. But it wasn’t “complex”.

From what I recall, it’s a story of wealth maintained not by the man who was the face of the family, but instead the lesser known and recognized wife of the man. It embodied the saying, “behind every great man is an even greater woman”.

It wasn’t him who knew how to manipulate markets with extreme wealth; it was her.

She starts to become mentally ill to the point where she gets put in a mental instituition.

p146 - “personal profit and the common good were not at odds with each other but could become, in capable hands, two sides of the same coin.”

This makes me think a bit about is it okay to be a billionaire as long as you are a truly good person? I still feel the answer is no. But it’s a bit more complex because power in our world and society is mostly controlled by wealth. If you want to push an agenda — even a really good one — it requires quite immense wealth. Political campaigns are becoming increasingly funding-driven, etc. It’s rarely about who is a better person or who has a better agenda, but instead who has the money to advertise — or counter-advertise — that agenda better.

The structure of this novel was on the right track with the structure. I just wish it would have gone been deeper into the general structure and had more complexities. It felt a bit surface-level.

p216 - “Wall Street was, he said, a fiction … Money. What is money? Commodities in a purely fantastic form. … if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction.”

p288 - “For the first time since meeting Andrew Bevel, it occurred to me that I should be afraid”

She was writing a book about money and power for him. He was trying to control his legacy and the image of him.

p297 - “I feel renewed shame for having helped him create this image of her. Nothing like that innocent, childlike and patronizingly ‘feminine’ picture emerges from these engagement books and calendars. … Why present her as a dabbling little girl?”

p299 - “the origin of capital has been slavery”

p300 - ==“her husband thought her presence should be reduced even more. Bevel’s decision to write and autobiography was moved, to a large extent, by his desire to clear his wife’s name and show that she was not the mentally ill recluse in Vanner’s novel. But reading these pages, it seems that more than vindicating Mildred he wanted to turn her into a completely unremarkable, safe character — just like the wives in the autobiographies of the Great Men … Put her in her place."==

p301 - you get confirmation that it was her doing the work all along.

p301 - her engagement books contradicts the amatuerish and decidely middlebrow picture Andrew painted of her, so these papers challenge the notion of Mildred as a passive or reckless philantropist.”

p382 - “one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.”