Hernan Diaz interview: 'I take the ethical implications of storytelling very seriously'

You’ve been praised for having a very good ear for the differing narrative styles of each of the book’s four distinct sections. The first section, a 1930s bestseller named Bonds, feels like a novel of its time. How did you capture its authentic flavour, and what were your influences?

I did my best to disappear from this book and let four different people take over. But some of my verbal tics seeped into each one of these voices. To remedy this, I composed four strict style guides – one for each author – detailing their punctuation, syntax, vocabulary, and grammatical idiosyncrasies. The tone of the first section results, in part, from engaging with some formal experiments of the 30s while also retaining a turn-of-the-century ring. The presence of Edith Wharton and Henry James can be felt everywhere in that part - but also Vernon Lee’s travel writing, for instance.

Part of the novel’s overall plan, however, was to create an arc going from realism to modernism – and beyond. The last section was conceived almost as a modernist prose poem. There are more or less overt references to Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and several other authors from the period. Meanwhile, the third section owes a great deal to some New Journalism writers like Lillian Ross and, crucially, Joan Didion.

Trust is saturated with references to British and American literature from the last hundred years. I also conducted extensive archival research and read countless documents written by the wives of real-life tycoons. Listening to their voices, many of which had remained unheard for a century (it was clear no one had ever gone through some of those manuscripts since they had been stored away), was quite moving.

In other interviews you have said that, in your research for the book, you realised that all the narratives around great wealth were from the viewpoint of men. Is that something you were particularly keen to address or correct in Trust?

Political power is always grounded in economic power – and both rely on the power of narrative for their perpetuation. Women have historically been excluded from partaking in the financial system. It was not until the 1960s in the US and 1975 in the UK that women were allowed to open a bank account in their own name, without their husband or father co-signing on it. The New York Stock exchange admitted its first woman in 1967; the London Stock Exchange followed suit in 1973.

These two examples help understand why there are no women in the great epics of wealth. Those myths are always about a self-made man. And in the vainglorious, manspreading autobiographies of financiers and captains of industry, the women around them are usually confined to the roles of wife and secretary – two stereotypes that Trust aims to subvert. It became pressing to me to address this exclusion and this utter erasure. Misogyny across the ideological spectrum (one of the main characters, an Italian anarchist, embodies a specific kind of ‘revolutionary machismo’) is a central concern of the novel.

One reviewer has said that Trust is ‘one of those novels that’s always pulling a fast one on the reader’ and delights in showing us how gullible we are. Was that as much fun as it sounds?

It was great fun! But I take the ethical implications of storytelling very seriously. While I am quite overtly encouraging readers to question the assumptions with which they enter into a text (and the degree of truthfulness they are willing to assign to it), I am also careful never to deceive anyone or to imply, at any point, that they are ‘gullible’.

I believe there is a moral dimension to how a narrative administers knowledge. Despite the twists and turns this book may take, many of the clues are there from early on. If the novel shifts perspectives and changes voices, it is because Trust is an attempt at exploring the nature of storytelling itself.

I love to read, and hope to write fiction that invites us to reflect on what literature may be. This implies challenging conventions while treating the reader with respect. I am interested in literature that takes the reader seriously. In fact, I always assume my interlocutor will be much smarter than me.