Memoirs and historical documents offer yet another example of trust-and my novel aims to defamiliarize a certain tone we’ve come to trust and take for the unmediated truth in those documents.īoth of your novels explore iconic moments in American history that are formative to the national identity. Point of view is another clear example of trust in fiction-I foam at the mouth whenever a narrator suddenly becomes omniscient just to present us with some cheap reveal. Genres are a great example of trust in literature-we feel a great sense of betrayal when conventions are violated for no good reason. As you read Trust and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. What do you think is the role of trust between the reader and the writer? Trust, the title of the book, is a financial term and a legal relationship, but it’s quite literally an experience. As he would go on to explain toward the end of that initial call, “Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else.” Born in Argentina, raised in Sweden, and now living in Brooklyn, Diaz is erudite and energetic both on the screen-our conversation began as a Zoom call when Diaz was on a fellowship in Italy-and on the page, in the email back-and-forth that followed. The novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a Swedish immigrant during the California Gold Rush. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support.”ĭiaz’s first novel, In the Distance, published in 2017, also reimagines America’s particular illusions. As one character declares halfway through, “Money is at the core of it all. The novel features a New York financier and his wife, moving between genres (a novel, a memoir, a diary) and time periods (the Gilded Age, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the eighties) while exploring the fabular nature of capitalism. Taking the mechanics of capital as its inspiration, Trust seeks to fill this gap. Money? Not so much,” Hernan Diaz observed during a conversation in early spring about the impetus behind his latest novel, Trust. Money talks-so goes the truism-but rarely is it the subject of fiction.
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