Trust
Trust
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Hernan Diaz on Trust
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A gap in the canon and a century of unopened boxesDiaz had spent years noticing that American literary fiction circles wealth without ever looking directly at how it is made. That absence struck him as a cultural evasion rather than an oversight, and it became the pressure point the book was built around.
Almost no novels in the American canon talk about money-making. Many American novels revolve around money, but the money’s already been made and the books are only about the adjacent symptoms bubbling up around money: the corseted manners of the wealthy and so on. Money has this almost transcendental place in American culture, yet it’s also taboo.
The archival research that gave the book its political center did not begin as a plan. Diaz went looking for the documented lives of the women behind early twentieth-century American fortunes and found something he had not anticipated: almost no one had looked before him.
I also went through countless archival boxes containing the personal papers of the wives of real-life tycoons from that period – and how poignant it was to discover that, in many cases, their notebooks and diaries had remained untouched (and their voices unheard) for a century...
That discovery converted a formal problem into an ethical one. The book would not simply depict erasure; its structure would enact the effort of recovery.
Once Diaz understood what those archives contained, the stakes of the project sharpened from aesthetic to political. The women who had been written out of financial history were not collateral damage; their removal was deliberate.
When we talk about money and power entwined, it’s a womanless world. They’ve been utterly erased from these narratives... That to me was extremely meaningful and demanded some sort of intervention, because it’s an intentional deletion.
How he wrote it
Four style guides, one fountain pen, no second draftThe four-section architecture of Trust, in which a fictional novel, a memoir, a personal diary, and a correction of the record sit in sequence and contradict one another, was not the book’s original shape. It emerged as Diaz kept confronting the inadequacy of a single voice.
The novel started out as a straight-up linear novel, and then as it took shape, it did so around this more complicated structure of four books within the book. [paraphrased from audio]
Making each of the book’s four fictional authors convincing as a distinct literary personality required Diaz to work at the level of punctuation and syntax before he wrote a word of their prose. He also read his way through what amounts to a small library of period primary sources, treating the reading as imaginative fuel rather than data collection.
The free associations, the haphazard hermeneutics, and, perhaps above all, the emotional dimension of reading have nothing to do with research.
The first of the book’s four sections, Bonds, a spare fictional novel about a 1920s financier and his wife, strips away nearly every conventional novelistic signal. When his editor flagged the omissions, Diaz confirmed they were structural decisions with a specific purpose: to make the book’s later turn inward feel like arrival after distance.
My editor said: ‘Do you realise there are no physical descriptions in the first part?’ And I was like, yes, it’s very intentional: nobody has a body, nobody has a face, and in the first 160 pages there’s only one line of dialogue – one word, one letter, ‘I’. It was a formal dare, almost like an Oulipian constraint.
The book’s four-part sequence maps onto sonata form, the classical musical structure in which themes are introduced, developed, and finally gathered into a coda. Diaz treats this as load-bearing architecture, not ornament.
The mimicry between music and literature back and forth is everywhere in the novel, beginning with, yes, the sonata form. Every good sonata form ends with a revisitation of all the themes that are gathered together in this final coda at the end, which is precisely what happens in the book.
Diaz’s sentence-by-sentence method, which he demonstrated on Late Night with Seth Meyers by producing his twenty-year-old Montblanc fountain pen, means the manuscript is finished when the last sentence is written. There is no revision phase in the conventional sense because revision is built into composition.
I don’t draft. I’m writing sentence by sentence and I’m editing all my sentences as I go along. So, when I’m done, I’m done and I keep editing like a crazy person forever but it’s not that then I go on to draft two; there is no draft two.
On what the book is wrestling with
The physics of serious moneyDiaz wanted a way to describe how extreme wealth operates on reality that went beyond social observation. The analogy he landed on is drawn from physics, and it frames the novel’s central argument about why the very rich can bend the stories told about them.
Serious money has the ability to distort reality. Given enough mass, it will ripple. There will be an event horizon, almost like a black hole. It affects time, it affects perception, and it will suck everything into it.
The book’s competing narratives are not just a formal game. They dramatize a claim Diaz makes directly: that wealth and power depend on controlling the stories that legitimate them, which is why the people who hold that power fight so hard to be the ones who write the history.
Every great fortune needs a self-legitimizing narrative. Power and money are extremely reliant on narrative. They can’t prop themselves up and stay up without these narratives. And this is why there is such an eagerness to be in control of history and the way in which we chronicle any kind of powerful institution or fortune.
Diaz has named Borges as the formal ancestor behind Trust’s nested fictional structure, in which a novel contains a memoir contains a diary contains a correction. He placed that debt on the record during the New York Times podcast, tying the book’s Argentine literary lineage to its American subject matter.
The unavoidable name here is the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He was a master of fictions within fictions, and playing with genre and context and different canons and messing with literary borders of any kind. [paraphrased from audio]
Beneath the formal architecture is a moral project that Diaz has stated with unusual directness. The four competing accounts of a single woman’s life are not an end in themselves; they are a method for recovering what wealth spent a century suppressing.
At the core of this project is an attempt to listen to the humanity that wealth has tried to erase.
What he wants us to sit with
A joyful paranoia, and the reader as conductorDiaz could have written a discursive novel about the unreliability of historical narrative. Instead he built a structure that puts readers inside the experience of being misled and then corrected, so the skepticism is felt rather than argued. This was the intended effect from early in the project.
Rather than thematise that in an expository way, I thought it would be more vivid — and fun — for readers to be presented with this polyphonic arrangement of four voices in succession and gently ask them to question why we trust one over the other.
The book’s effect on readers is something Diaz has described with deliberate pleasure. He wants the novel to leave people unable to accept a confident, authoritative account at face value, including accounts far outside the world of the book.
I hope that perhaps I will have induced sort of a joyful form of paranoia in the reader.
The four voices of Trust never fully resolve into a single, settled account of what happened to Mildred Bevel, the woman at the center of all four narratives. Diaz designed that irresolution as a feature, not a failure, and he assigns the work of synthesis to the reader.
These four voices conform what I hope will be read as a choral novel, and the reader is the conductor of this choir. It is up to the reader to decide how these four voices come together (or not) to emphasise the different counterpoints, and to highlight the consonances and dissonances between them. Somewhere, in the meeting of these voices — and, also, in the silences between them — we may hear the always faint and elusive ring of truth.