The New Yorker Radio Hour - Hernan Diaz’s “Trust,” a Novel of High Finance

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

The daughter of eccentric aristocrats marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. That sounds like a plot that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written, or Edith Wharton. But “Trust,” by the writer Hernan Diaz, is very much of our time. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting accounts of the couple’s life, the tycoon Andrew Bevel’s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. And though a book like “The Great Gatsby” tends to skirt around the question of how the rich make their money, Hernan Diaz puts that question at the heart of “Trust.” “What I was interested in, and this is why I chose finance capital, I wanted a realm of pure abstraction,” he tells David Remnick. Diaz was nearly unknown when “Trust,” his second novel, won the Pulitzer Prize this year. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The daughter of eccentric aristocrats marries a Wall Street tycoon during the roaring 20s. It all sounds like a book that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written, or maybe Edith Wharton, something in the vicinity of the Great Gatsby or the House of Mirth. But trust by Hernon Diaz is very much of our time. It's a novel told by four different narrators who give conflicting accounts of the marital life of a fictional couple and also of the tycoon's gross misdeeds and his role in the crash of 1929. And while a book like Gatsby or the House of Merth tends to skirt around the question of how the rich actually make their money, Hernon Diaz puts that question at the very heart of trust.

He's concerned with finance capitalism and how it works and what's ignored along the way. The book received a Pulitzer Prize this year, and I asked Hernan Diaz about the title Trust. I wanted something that was performing what the book was also doing and saying. So trust has the value of having sort of all these semantic strata. You know, it's a highly layered word. And it addresses the financial aspect of the novel, but also what to me, above the issue of capital in the novel, it speaks to the issue of confidence.

The novel, Trust, is sort of a gentle invitation to the reader to question these tacit agreements that we all enter into every time we read a text. And this is why we have four voices.

As I mentioned, trust isn't one linear story. It's told in four parts. One part is a work of fiction, a book within a book, and there are memoir and a personal diary by other characters. Each part reveals more and more about the mysterious financier Andrew Bevel and his financial dealings. What I was interested in in the book,

and this is also why it chose finance capital over, you know, the manufacturing of concrete goods or providing, you know, tangible services, I wanted a realm of pure absolute abstraction, you know, In the book, at one point, you know, someone speaks of the incestuous genealogies of capital, you know, capital, beginning capital, beginning capital. And this removal, I think that leads eventually to labor, of course. But in that dizzyingly high spheres of finance, every human trace of labor has been erased.

I was very interested in that. And also that high degree of abstraction allowed me to think of these financiers. in my book, a little bit, and I don't mean this as a redeeming quality at all, but a little bit as estates or, you know, pure artists who are all about the process and not about the result. That's fascinating, because in the first section, I get that entirely, that his engagement with money is as, it's not, the luxury part of it, the reward doesn't seem to mean anything to him, it's the game itself. Absolutely.

You know, that's what I was going for, just to show money purely as an abstraction and not as a means to an end. If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing.

It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected.

All he had to do was think, speak, and perhaps write. The core of the book takes place in the late 30s, So I thought I would read everything that would have been accessible up to that point. So I went from Benjamin Franklin to Herbert Hoover. That was the time span. And I read everything I could find over those couple of centuries. So you're reading about the robber barons. You're reading about the major industrialists and financiers and bankers.

I'm reading them as much as I can. So I also know that you come from a background. Your parents were committed leftists, I think, is the phrase in the New York Times book review. That's the shorthand. Really? Is that with me? Okay. Trotsky is Stephen. Yes. How much of those politics did you inherit and make your own and bring to the book?

None is the answer. I mean, my father, I'm reluctant to say this sort of publicly, but my father's ghost haunts. a great part of this book. There is a character who is an Italian anarchist, who is very dogmatic, very unbending, inflexible. And, you know, it was a ciphered way for me to deal with that legacy from my father, whom I loved very much. And he died some seven years, seven, eight years ago.

But, and he also moved away from that sort of political paradox. This is the character of Partenza. That's right. Yeah. Perhaps encouraged by the wine, my father was particularly fiery that afternoon. The time has come for action. Mussolini crushing Italy under his boot,

Franco massacring Spain, Stalin murdering his own with his purges, Hitler getting ready to devour Europe. Yes, the time has come for action. He looked out the window. How did we get here? How? You have four voices in this novel.

The reader, people listening should know that it's not like the great Gatsby. It's not in just the voice of Tom. It is, it keeps, you shift point of view, you shift time and place. It's extraordinarily clever, but the cleverness should not be an anti-endorsement. It's part of the immense appeal of the book. How is that architecture built and toward what end? I was hoping it wouldn't be a gimmick or a mere sort of... If it had been, I would have thrown it against the wall and moved on to the next thing.

Yeah, I probably would have given up myself, too, as a writer, because I'm not interested sort of in... It's a deep part of the pleasure of the book. Oh, thank you. As I was saying before, I thought that the best way and the most fun way for the readers, hopefully, to try to interrogate. the ways in which we read would be for me to confront them with different texts in different voices, in different genres, written in different periods of time, and build a certain trust, forgive me,

you know, for each one of these four voices, and then swiftly proceed to demolish it, and then rebuild it for the next section that also interrogates the preceding one. In other words, instead of merely presenting the issue of voice in a monographical way within the novel, why not enact it formally and have it be an experience in reading the text? I'm talking with Ernan Diaz about his novel, Trust. We'll continue in a moment. Hi, I'm Adam Howard, a senior producer for the radio hour, and I have a quick favor to ask of you.

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Of these main characters, did you find them all equally enjoyable to write about, or is enjoyment just not a factor in the hard work of writing. Enjoyment is a big factor for me. I don't buy into the whole Dostoevsky notion that one should be, you know, in some kind of... You're not sweating blood at the desk. I'm not. I mean, life's too short.

There are the things to do if you don't enjoy writing. Like, what's the point? I read somewhere that the two writers that interested you in driving that forward were Lillian Ross, a writer for the New Yorker. That's right. who kind of invented the celebrity profile with her profile of Hemingway many, many years ago. And Joan Didion, quite a different writer

whose sentences fall on the page like one razor blade after another, quite a very different voice. Yeah, Didian was a massive presence there, and I realized, here's a little anecdote. You know, all voices had to be very different, and I didn't want to bribe the reader with little kind of chotchkes and mannerisms,

that's the easy way to do it. I didn't want to resort to different fonts or any kind of design distinction between. It had to be in a subtle way in language. And my heart sank when I realized editing the third version that the use of commas in certain subordinate clauses

was the same for everyone. So I read, I reread Diddy, White Album, which is my favorite book of hers, and marked up all of the commas in it, and then proceeded to steal it. And it was such a disaster, David. It sucked so hard. It didn't work at all.

But that failed experiment that consumed so much of my time learned me to punctuate and to use commas, famously the hardest punctuation mark there is, in a totally new way. Renan, I've got to confess, I didn't know your books, and I didn't know your name before, before reading trust anyway. So you've just turned 50, and I hope you'll forgive the impolite question. Were you a kind of late starter to fiction? Can you tell me your story of getting started as a writer of novels and stories?

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Even before I learned how to write, I would show my mother doodles as my latest sort of story. And I've always been doing things around books. I'm an academic. I worked as a critic. And, of course, writing fiction all along, for the most part in English. And for the longest time, well over a decade, I was unable to place my work. It was turned down by magazines, by collections, short story collections.

I had novels that I couldn't place either, turned down by... Editors and agents. Including this magazine, I gather. Including this magazine. Okay. Our loss. Yes. Our loss.

These things happen. With perfect consistency. And for how long? When did you start writing fiction and submitting them to editors? I would say, you know, in the early 2000s, this is all I wanted to do, despite the world telling me to please stop, you know. And I was doing it in a void without any kind of objective. legitimation from the world. You know, in the distance is my first published novel,

but there is a whole invisible body of work, including novels that, you know, I probably won't publish now because I'm a different writer. So I wouldn't say I'm a late bloomer. I just was very late to be published. Was the world too hard on you? In other words, was the world wrong?

I don't want to take out my tiny little violin here and sort of say how the world wronged me in any way. What I will say is I am the same writer now that I was then. Of course, there has been growth, evolution, transformations, metamorphoses. But I'm not going to lie, there is a sense of vindication because I've been consistent. I didn't change the course, is what I'm trying to say. You were born in Argentina, spent time in Sweden,

and back to Argentina. And it wasn't until, you know, you were a grown man that you moved to the English-speaking realm. Tell me about your history of your language and how it works. In other words, I assume Spanish is your first language. How quickly were you fluent in English? I don't know. Spanish is my mother tongue, is what we spoke at home, always still. And then we moved to Sweden, and Swedish became my social tongue.

and then we moved back to Argentina and I feel that and Swedish was taken away from me you know we didn't speak it at home anymore did you lose it? No, I speak it without a trace of an accent but with the vocabulary of a 10-year-old and most exchanges with strangers

begin with I have to explain this to you you know so they know and then how does English enter your life right? Yeah so in my early teens I think I must have been 14, 15 English came to me through Borges, who is a very important writer to me and a big anglophile, and he introduced me to the Anglo-American canon.

And I started reading, you know, Stevenson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson, and so on and so forth, thanks to him. But why did you make the decision to write trust in English, your fiction in English? Well, I wrote trust in English in the distance, all my stories, and all those unpublished texts. So, you know, English, aside from the big events in my family and having a family, you know, becoming a parent and meeting my wife, I think English was the biggest event that happened to me in my life, that encounter. To the extent that I shaped my life around it, I moved to England, then to the United States, to live in England. And now, it's very hard to explain love, and that's what I feel for the English language. I can rationalize it. I can give you a little listical, if you want, of reasons why it speaks to me and why I speak through it.

I love its lexical wealth and generosity, its inclusiveness. You know, Romans languages are, you know, expel of words from their dictionaries. How do you mean? They're very conservative. Spanish is conservative. I think French is as well. Italian might be as well. Yeah. You know, you have the academia, the Royal Academy in Spanish.

And, you know. But isn't Spanish full of inclusiveness in geography and slang and all kinds of flexibility the way English is? Oh, absolutely. No, I'm just talking institutionally. And I'm not saying that one language, I want to make this abundantly clear, I am most emphatically not saying that one language is richer than the other. I was just merely talking about the academy and institutional policy regarding language,

and I feel English is without a question as a language more inclusive than other languages. Hernan, the thing that you care about so intensely, the creation of these texts and the reading of these texts, I'm holding your book up. It means everything to you. And yet it too exists in an economy. It exists in what we now call endlessly, the attention economy. Oh. That competes against, I'm now picking up my phone and all the other million things that it competes against.

And a lot of literary writers are concerned with, and you hear this complaint all the time, that this is becoming, it always was a minority obsession, but it's now becoming even more so. Even as it becomes a richer, more diverse world of voices being published, the business of setting aside two hours in an evening of concentrated attention on an enigmatic text gets harder and harder. I know, and it breaks my heart because precisely what I like about the novel as a forum,

another thing that I like, is that it enables us to experience time in a totally different way. The way it compresses and dilates time, the time within the text, and the time passing for us as readers, and how those two are in conversation or tension, is a beautiful thing to me, but I understand it's antagonistic to the way we live now. But perhaps we should put this in historical perspective. I mean, universal literacy is a very new thing, historically speaking, It's hardly, you know, I don't have the years here, but wouldn't you say it's around a century long, you know, in the West, which is the world, the place that I know a little bit off.

And before then, the written words circulated in a very limited way. And of course, that was a power move that goes without saying. So I think this period where literature reigned in this way and was our main way of interacting with meaning might be at an end. And this doesn't make me happy at all. I'm just taking a step back and looking at... I think it might be at an end. You do. I'm asking you.

It's definitely changing our experience with text, how we navigate text. You know, words, written words, has changed already. Add to that the fact that, you know, we are increasingly communicating in nonverbal ways, and very effectively so. And I don't want to be conservative or sort of an old curmudgeon. I think it will be very interesting and it will be exciting, but it probably won't be for me. Hernandez, yes, thank you so much. Thank you, David. This has been such a joy. Trust is the second novel by Hernon Diaz, and it won the Pulitzer Prize this year.

I'm David Remnick, and that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening, and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Madder. Louis Mitchell and Gophon in Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deccan.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.