Poured Over: Hernan Diaz on Trust

“And the title, of course, has this double meaning, the financial meaning of trust, and let’s call it, emotional meaning of trust … To what extent can I trust this voice and the book, to a large extent is questioning the contracts we enter into as readers.” Hernan Diaz follows up his acclaimed debut novel, In the Distance (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), with Trust, a stunning book-about-a-book, an exploration of capital and greed and the making of myths. Hernan joins us on the show to talk about how the stories of Great Men influenced his latest, bringing women back into the story of American business and capital, authenticity, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and other literary influences, why he writes, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the segment with a TBR Topoff segment featuring book recommendations from Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley  

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Hernan Diaz, if you did not see or read In the Distance, his debut novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Trust is his new novel, it is just out and it is wildly well timed. And I’m gonna let her in and explain what I mean by that. You want to set it up?

Hernan Diaz: Well, thank you, thank you. I’m a big fan of your show. I’ve listened to many of the episodes and it’s such an honor to be here. And also Barnes and Noble is such a big part of my family life, we live a block away from the one on Court Street, my daughter, and I go there all the time. It’s genuinely a pleasure to be here. And I’m looking forward to our conversation. So yes, Trust is a book about extreme wealth and capital. There are two reasons, main reasons, I should say, that moved me to write this book. The first one was that I became interested in the almost mystical dimension that capital has in American culture, and the book was written during the Trump years, for the most part, I became very fascinated additionally, by how money and wealth were able to shape the reality around them. This to me was a fascinating thing. The second reason is that, although a capital has this transcendental aura in American culture, looking back at the American canon, I found that there were very few novels that dealt with capital itself. Sure, there are a number of novels that deal with let’s call it the symptoms of wealth, class, eccentricity, the eccentricities of the wealthy, or even sort of the effects on the marginalized population, sort of the flip side of wealth, which is poverty and exploitation, you see all of this, and there is a vast, rich tradition about that. But there are precious few books that deal with the process of accumulation, and how that impacts on reality. And I’m not saying that my book is here to fill that void. All I’m saying is that that void made me tick, and made me curious. And it was a productive absence too.

B&N: A productive absence that turned into a really great story. You’ve written a book about a book, in essence, and we aren’t gonna go spoiler free in this conversation, because there’s a lot that happens, where the emotional payoff is really significant. And I refuse to ruin that for another reader. I absolutely refuse. I, I’ve read this book very quickly, which some people might say, Oh, well, that’s a great thing. And other people will say, Well, why are you rushing? It’s not that I was rushing. It’s just that I didn’t want to leave the story. Because of the way it’s structured. You’ve created four separate books. The first piece of the novel is Bonds by Harold Manor. The second piece is called My Life by Andrew Bevel. The third is a memoir, Remembered by Ida partenza. And the last piece is called Futures by Mildred Bevel. And we’re going to just maybe hang out mostly in the first three sections of this book. Sounds wise. So first, we meet this couple, Benjamin and Helen Rask. And would you fill in some of the gaps without spoiling their story? Because it’s kind of wild.

HD: Okay, yes. So first, a quick word about the structure of the book. As I educated myself, you know, I come from the humanities, I have a PhD in comparative literature, so very far removed from the world of finance. So it was a steep incline learning curve. As I educated myself on this topic, two things really grabbed me and became central concerns for me, and they’re interlinked. The first one is that a fortune or money or capital in general, is highly mediated, it’s made up by many layers of mainly labor really appropriated labor. So it seemed wrong to tell the story about capital in one sort of mono phonic voice, it had to be a plural voice, because the nature of capital is plural. That was the first decision sort of the subject matter informing the form. Sounds redundant but there you go. The second thing I learned during this brutal education was that this was a womenless world, there are zero women in the narratives of capital. By this I mean, not only the few fictions around capital that are out there that I mentioned at the beginning, but also sort of in historical accounts. I read a lot of history books, but also I usually the way in which I work, I focus on primary materials. So I was reading books by financiers and yeah, every now and then there is sort of a mention of wife as the great woman behind the great man, that cliche thing, but it’s a purely masculine world, which to me was something that had to be dealt with, because obviously, the women were there, and obviously, they had been silenced and erased out of these stories. These two cores that I came up with, on the first hand, the highly mediated nature of capital. On the other hand, the absence of women dictated a little bit the form of the book so that this is why there are four books because it’s a very mediated narrative and also the book is about the meaning of having or being deprived of the voice who is given a megaphone, and who is gagged, populating the book with different voices, some of which have been suppressed and come out, you know, that’s part of the experience of reading the book. So populating the book with all these voices making this polyphonic book was very important to me. The first book, The novel within the novel, it’s called Bonds by this fictional novel is called Harold Vanner. And Harold Vanner is one of the central characters in the book, but he never appears in the book. He doesn’t have a body, he has a voice and as much as we read his novel, but then we don’t see him, we never get to meet him. We only meet his work, and people talk about his work a lot in the book. So the novel is written toward the end of the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and his voice is a little outdated. He’s a little bit decadent. He’s very, Jamesian or Gortonian. So it’s sort of a turn of the century boys. Oh, sorry. That’s my mom calling. Hi, Mom. Hi, mom. Oh, the age of zoom. You can leave that in if you think it’s charming.

B&N: I think we might actually, okay.

HD: So the novel is told in this sort of a little bit, intentionally anachronistic or decadent tone, and it is, to a certain extent, the novel of manners. It’s a novel about this couple, Benjamin Rask, who is one of the wealthiest men in the world. That’s the extent of his fortune, who meets the penniless daughter of Albany aristocrats, sort of she’s a blue blooded Dutch settler, pre Revolutionary War family, but they’re totally broke. But they connect in some way that the both to certain extent introverts and very different and they connect through this difference. We just see Rask’s ascent from an immense wealth to something that is really out of control and his role in the 1929 crash. We also see to some extent, what happens emotionally to his wife around this sort of heroic or pseudoheroic ascent and what toll it takes on her. So this is the first novel and it’s told in his very, to certain extent, lush prose, it was important to me that there was some kind of sympathy between the style and the world, the style is depicting, but it’s also to a certain extent, very removed. It’s a very hovering kind of prose, there’s no dialogue.

B&N: There are a couple of things that happen to that for a little while, but they telescope who these people are, I mean, at one point, Helens parents take her to Zurich, and they get stuck there because World War One starts and they had no idea it was coming. Yes, Helen and Benjamin are brought together by Helen’s mother, who’s also kind of in using her daughter as a party trick. Helen’s got a prodigious memory, she speaks multiple languages, she can talk about books until the cows come home, among other things, and she’s got all of these abilities. And Mama thinks, Well, I’ve got to find a home for my daughter, because that’s the era.

HD: Yeah, that’s the era. They did something that people used to do at the end of sort of turn of the 19th to 20th century, impoverished American aristocrats would sort of go to mainly Italy and British once too and basically kind of couch surf through Europe and freeload and crash at wealthier friends, villas and things like that. And so Helen’s mother is she’s very astute socially and a climber and a matchmaker, eventually, for her own daughter. And her father, on the other hand, is a mystic, he becomes sort of engulfed in this world of slightly paranoid mystical plots and conspiracies, he starts out as a Swedenborg scholar, and then becomes sort of sucked in by these occult circles. And they’re really out of it. She’s a socialite, he is lost in the celestial realms, and they have an utter disregard sort of for everyday life, they couldn’t care less. So in effect, they’re trapped in Switzerland for the duration of the war, and they have no means to return to the United States. So Helen is also she has this weird upbringing. You know, you just heard about her parents, but she’s also from nowhere, really, which is something you know, I personally also can relate to a little bit having moved around so much.

B&N: Well, and that sense of exile and isolation isn’t limited to Helen because even Benjamin, who grew up in a very wealthy family in New York, his experience of family is what his legacy is. This is my great grandfather. This is my great grandfather’s father, and readers will learn this, he can break out what each of these men represents and how they responded to events in their day. They’re not people to him. So even in his own home, he’s isolated even in his own home, he lives in a kind of exile because at some point, both of his parents die. He’s surrounded by staff. He’s got all of these young baby bankers who want to work for him and learn his magic. And yet when they leave his employ, they can’t duplicate what he did.

HD: Yeah, exactly, exactly right. I would also add to the series of exiles that you mentioned he’s exiled within his marriage too and I think one of the challenges for me, and of course, marriage is one of the maybe like five topics there is for novels. One of the challenges for me was to write about a marriage where the man, this very incredibly powerful man is absolutely mesmerized by his wife. It’s this profound love that he feels for her, but he can’t voice it, he can’t act on it. On the other hand, his wife, this, it’s totally asymmetrical. She doesn’t correspond this but I didn’t want for her to be disdainful of his feelings. I always wanted for her to be almost, and I say this without any kind of condescension, but compassionate like she, she understands who he is what he feels but cannot reciprocate. And it’s a relationship of enormous respect and enormous care, but utterly loveless on her on her side. And that, to me, was a very interesting nuance tongue to explore, you know.

B&N: There’s an emotional truth to your novel within a novel, the story that Vanner is telling this couple, Benjamin and Helen Rask, that when you get to the second section of your book, when you get to My Life by Andrew Bevel, and you realize who this guy is, and what he’s talking about, I had one note.

HD: Can I have it?

B&N: The note is literally just that the voice in the second section to me, as I was reading, and then when I got to the third section, I was like, Oh, I was right about this. It felt really anxious. And it felt a little fraudulent to me, not in the sense that I didn’t think you knew the voice cold. I’m just saying I didn’t trust the man who was telling me the story. Yeah, I thought he just rubbed me the wrong way. And it was great, because I’m thinking, Alright, how did these two pieces balance each other?

HD: Right. Well, I’m very glad. And I’m sorry, I know, it’s an easy shot, but you use the word Trust. It’s a softball that I have to sort of go back to the book. And the title, of course, has this double meaning the financial meaning of trust, and the let’s call it emotional meaning of trust, if trust is an emotion, but the second part of the book, I suppose we moved on to that starts posing this question about trusting the Will we go back to the voice issue as well, right? To what extent can I trust this voice and the book, to a large extent is questioning the contracts we enter into as readers. Every time we read anything, you know, I feel that every text has a tacit has an implicit, those Apple agreements we scroll through and click without reading that happens with every text, there are terms and conditions that we enter into and tacitly accept whenever we read whatever we read. And the terms and conditions usually have to do with the level of truthfulness and veracity we attached to the text. So again, trust, and this is something that interests me enormously about this narrative. And that’s why also it has this slightly bizarre form, the book, and has all these I call them documents, these four sections and how these documents make you question your trust in what you have just read and what lies ahead in the book. So yes, it is this voice. And again, I would have to say it was written during the Trump years again, this voice is designed to be a little annoying, honestly, it’s a tough voice to read in the sense. It’s a short section by designed to like it’s whatever, 40 pages or something. And it’s very fragmentary. So it’s not even full 40 pages, or takes maybe 20 when you compile them all together, but it is designed to produce a certain degree of distance and discomfort. And I think that’s very important. And it’s also section there’s a lot of money talk in it, you know, which I was also very interested in. And this is related to, again, the notion of trust in political discourse, right, which is, I feel, especially with the financial genre, if there is such a thing, I think a certain degree of obfuscation is baked into the prose always as if to tell readers or listeners that this is really esoteric stuff. And if you haven’t been trained in this money cult, there is no hope for you. And you can resign yourself to not being able to understand what this is about. And this distance is intentional. And I wanted to explore that in this section of the book.

B&N: That language is really important that the distance is also really important, but it’s also very revealing about Andrew Bevel, because he believes with his entire body and soul that his financial success is tied to the success of America. That he has this outsized roles in the success of not just the market in the US, but it’s almost like those folks who believe that you know, your morality goes hand in hand with the amount of money you have, that’s somehow your success is measured, and it’s wild to see him reveal himself.

HD: It’s wild. I think it’s something that’s in a American culture since the pilgrims, you know, I think it’s a very Calvinistic idea. It just didn’t happen during Ronald Reagan or something. It’s a deep notion, the fact that material success in this world is sort of a harbingers or a sort of form of enunciation of the rewards that lie beyond this world. I think that’s very embedded in the way in which we look at the world, by we we mean, people who live in the United States.

B&N: And Bevel is a character too. I mean, he really is a little sanctimonious. Essentially so.
HD: No, no, he’s sanctimonious. He’s self righteous. And also, I mean, not to get all sort of current events on you. But to me, it was also fascinating to see, you know, I was reading about Republican administrations in the 1920s. And then here we were with a Republican administration in almost the 2020s. You know, and the ideological continuity between those two projects, and the sanctimonious ness of both was just so incredible to me. And so revealing, like, I confess, I didn’t know the extent to which there was there was a direct line from one period to the next in terms of fiscal policy, you know, the tax cuts for the rich, which in the 20s, when the top marginal tax rate went from, like 70-75% to 22%, and drastic cuts were taking place out here in the present, as I was writing it, the notion of American exceptionalism, like you had Harding running on his campaign slogan was America first, you know, small government, big business, deregulation of financial practices across the board, restrictions on immigration, you know, from certain countries, not all of them, Asia, and Italy, in the 20s are regions rather than countries and the list really goes on and on and on protectionist tariffs, blah, blah, blah. So there was something there that to me was important to address and a voice that was important to capture that goes back to again, this kind of Calvinist mystical notion of material success, but also it’s embedded with in the history of the Republican Party in this country, and was to me very present today. And it all comes tied in with this. As he said, the sanctimonious tone of stomach it was hard to live in that world for the time it took to write it.

B&N: There’s one other piece that I think modern readers will grab much more quickly than Andrew himself, which is, in today’s terms, he’d be a billionaire. I mean, the man has made insane amounts of money. And he claims that it’s all based on sort of instinct, and you know, hard work, all of the things that we’ve heard a million times before, dude has no sense of humor about himself. None, nothing about himself is funny.

HD: Again, it was really hard to inhabit that voice for that all the time. He takes himself extremely, extremely seriously, is infallible to like, he can’t make a mistake. And all of this also, I would like to come back reel this back in all the time with new American history in the sense that I was reading all these first-hand materials like Andrew Carnegie’s biography, Henry Ford’s autobiography, Calvin Coolidge, his autobiography, and the list goes on and on and on. And I went back all the way to Benjamin Franklin. And they all had this in common. And I give one of my characters this line, you know, because I sort of included my own archival process in the book, it’s one of the protagonists is actually this rifling through papers. It’s an important thing in the book, the unshakable certainty of these men that they deserve to be listened and that their lives were extraordinary and that their lives were faultless, you know, and exemplary. It’s really psychotic, the narcissism is mind boggling. So I tried to give this character that complete certainty, which is just demented.

B&N: It’s demented. But it is as much as I was saying, you know, the voice is anxious and everything. It’s fun to read, because you’ve got that first piece. That’s a little wild. Yeah. And then you’ve got this guy, and I’m like, no good is gonna come with this. But this brings us to Ida. And Ida is awesome. And Ida is the character that you gave that habit of rifling through papers and your research and she is the woman who has to read all of the biographies of what she calls capital G capital M. Great Men.

HD: Yes, that’s right.

B&N: And she does all of your research. Yes, because Andrew Bevel has hired her to ghostwrite his autobiography. That’s right. And I don’t think we’re giving up too much there because it does explain some of the strangeness of the voice in the second section of the book because she’s decided that part of her job is to create this mythic American. But let’s talk about his background for a second. She’s very smart. She’s self made. She is absolutely a writer. She’s a wonderful character, but this is not necessarily her work.

HD: No, no. So Ida is one of my favorite people ever. I don’t know where she came from, because she’s so good in the world. She’s so effective and a go getter and just in a way that I don’t know what I tapped into. But I just wish I could channel that in my everyday life i that lives in Brooklyn not too far from where I live in real life, not anymore. It used to be a sort of a little Italian community in a certain part of Brooklyn. And her father is an Italian anarchist, who was exiled from Italy, sort of in the early 1900s. And he has a press, he’s a typesetter, and the old sort of movable type press where he prints sort of wedding invitations, cards and things he despises, because they’re for the bourgeoisie, but in between jobs, he prints anarchist newspapers. And Ida is initially the scrappy kid who teaches herself how to type and sort of the basics of accounting and stenography. And she ultimately, she’s very talented. And she’s an excellent writer, she writes since she was a kid, and ultimately landed this job as Bevel’s secretary. So again, I would pause here and say also, the novel explores sort of remember how we said that the women were raised from these worlds. And so for the first part, sort of, it’s the wife of what being a wife and in this configuration, then the second role that women were given was the role of secretary right. And this is something very interesting to me to how in the 20s and 30s, women started entering the white collar labor force in the United States, and can aspire to ascend to the middle class without having to marry into it, you know, and this is a big, big, big, big shift. And there are new technologies at play, and how sort of the bodies of these women interact with these new technologies. Office technologies is also very interesting to me. Ida, the hero of this third part, is told by these men, her father, who’s a very strong willed person, her boss, who is this complicated man, we’ve just been talking about her boyfriend who is also ambitious in his own way. And she is completely on purpose sort of alone among these men and has to navigate the situation.

B&N: And she also has more money than any of the men in her life.

HD: They resent her immensely for that. I should also say, I think this may be of interest that this whole section, the third document in the book is narrated as a bit of a flashback. So it’s a framed narrative. So there are frames within frames within frames in the book. And Ida at this point is 70 years old, she is a tremendously successful author, she’s published a number of books, she contributes to the New Yorker on a regular basis, she’s well known. And I read a lot of new journalism, especially by women. And she’s that kind of writer, I had to learn how to write that way, too, I should say, I created style guides for each section with you know how punctuation is used by each one of these authors and how certain clauses are used and deployed, and what kind of vocabulary just to have some sense of consistency. And I have to say, this section, the Ida section was the one that was most heavily edited and rewritten and tweaked to achieve this very polished, elegant, but invisible, like I didn’t want to stand out, which is sometimes a hard thing for me to do.

B&N: Ida is still slightly unreliable, there are things that she decides. And obviously, we’re not going to get totally into the weeds here, because that’s one of the great pleasures of reading this section is putting together pieces that Ida either doesn’t completely have, or doesn’t want to have.

HD: What do you mean, doesn’t want to have?

B&N: I think there are a couple of moments and I’m trying to dance around it a little bit. But there are a couple of moments where she sort of reveals herself as she’s working on different pages. And there’s a moment at dinner, where she’s shocked because bevel recites a piece of her life back to her because she’s given it to his wife. Yes. And as a reader, I felt like, oh, a moment like this was going to have to come because of the way Bevel was responding to what she was writing and how she was writing and that he can’t ever lose control. And yet she’s still surprised. And I’m like, lady, you’re spending more time with this dude than any of us ever realize. We’re talking about fictional characters here. But that moment, I think for her was shocking.

HD: That moment was shocking. And it also speaks to, and to Bevel, her boss, it speaks to his greed, you know, which goes well beyond money or material goods. He has this symbolic greed to he claims everything for himself that will enhance and enlarge his image and to me it was it was the that, that situation of having your best ideas stolen and pitched back at you, not even to you. And it’s a moment when you feel both crazy and enraged, like how can this man not replace that I told him this, like, you know, five minutes ago, and now he’s completely appropriated this thought, and there’s this selective amnesia that has erased me out of it. And he just, although what I thought they’d come up with, and that, to me was a very important moment, also, because, again, it has to do with trust. And it has to do with what is someone’s life story and how even people with the best intentions end up, inevitably, appropriating other sort of narrative strands, or bits and bobs and pieces and incorporating them into their own narrative and how each story is, to a certain extent, well intentioned or not a bit of a collage. And it also leads you to think what is authenticity? What is truly my life? Am I in possession of my own narrative? I doubt it. To be honest, I doubt it. I mean, doesn’t make us all jerks, like Andrew bevel is I think we feel overly possessive about our identity. And we put too much stock in how cohesive supposedly our stories or histories are, you know, and this is also why this kind of testimonial tribe that I see in literature of so many writers presenting their own selves as a finished thing, you know, forward is something that I view with great wonder.

B&N: And Ida, I think, represents a lot of what you just said. But that moment that we were just talking about at dinner, where he recites a piece of her story back to her is also when she realizes how petty, capital G, capital M Great Man, is how petty he is and what his actual desire is, and I don’t want to give too much away, but he wants to counter a narrative. He wants to control, as you said, his entire persona, but he wants to control the way that other people see him.

HD: I think you’re totally right. And thank you for that insight. But I would also add to what you just said, either doesn’t only realize how petty he is, she also realizes how powerful she is, yes, because she is molding a life for him. That’s an immense power to have. And she’s very good at it, too.

B&N: At one point, she even mentions that she’s a little bit of his Frankenstein. He’s her monster. And she’s the doctor. And she has figured this out. And it is pretty terrific. But mixed in with the shock and everything else. There are a couple of other writers and we’ve talked about Edith Wharton, we’ve talked about Henry James.

HD: Well, Frankenstein is a very important book to me. I keep going back.

B&N: Okay, let’s take a minute on Frankenstein for a second because that’s not necessarily something that you see paired up with Wharton and James and then there are two other women that show up later in the book two writers that I happen to love Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. Can we talk about the spectrum of literary influences and dig in on Frankenstein?

HD: To start with Frankenstein. It’s a book I’ve written about, like I’ve written a couple of essays on it. And it also informed my first novel in the distance. It’s you know, Frankenstein’s big footprint is to be found everywhere in that first book, in this case, as well. I mean, it’s thinking of Mary Shelley and thinking of Victor Frankenstein’s creation, this body made out of which is a hodgepodge of bodies. And we’re talking about collage a moment ago, and how personal narratives or a collage to some extent always, at one point, the thing about Andrew Bevel, this Tycoon, is that he is pretty bland person, he’s not the big, strong man that he would like to be on the page. What happens in the book, at some point, maybe then halfway into it is that Ida, his secretary, because she keeps transcribing what he says, and he’s displeased with what he reads, He wants it to be more forceful, but have more weight on the page, which is not him. It’s just not him. So she decides to give him the voice that he wishes he had. So she calls from all these different sources and says I would create a monster just like Dr. Frankenstein did, out of all these bodies that would create textual bodies that would create his voice and even her own father is one of these voices. So I’m very interested in this figure, in this trope, in this metaphor of generating new life out of leftovers, that, to me is something very powerful and very interesting, and also the agency of this woman in that process.

B&N: It’s a trope that really works too as each page and each section. I know you keep calling them documents, but as each section reveals itself, it’s really the way you peel the layers off and the way big moments are revealed in very quiet ways.

HD: Thank you for noticing that because the temptation here of having big explosive reveals was strong. And because of the formal configuration of the book, it would have been easy to do that, to have like, big reveals. And I decided to not do that for the most part. So I can freely say like, when Andrew Bevel dies, I don’t care about this spoiler, because it’s not a spoiler. It’s presented well in advance. Like, it’s not that he died. And you know, that’s just a small example to show that, to me, it was about something else. It wasn’t about pyrotechnics, or, you know, fireworks of any kind. Yeah.

B&N: We’re always aware of the characters’ humanity. We’re always aware of their fallibility. We’re always aware of their desires. I mean, they’re really alive on the page. They’re all very different people, but they’re all very, very alive on the page. And you mentioned that Ida was not, you weren’t quite sure where she came from. But if she’s the biggest surprise, do you have a favorite moment?

HD: In the book? I have to say my favorite moment is the fourth section or document however you want to call them, which is a personal journal, a diary that comes to light, it was a moving thing to write. It’s a thing where I feel hope this doesn’t sound gross, but I feel very exposed in that section personally, not because I am that person, because I’m obviously not, but there is an emotional texture there. It feels very intimate to me. You mentioned Virginia Woolf for Jean Rhys. To me, that whole section also is just as the very first section the novel within the novel is also a love letter, mainly to writers Edith Wharton and Henry James that are all important to me. Like I wouldn’t be the human being I am, let alone the writer, I wouldn’t be the person I am without Henry James especially, and Edith Wharton. But the fourth section is a love letter than to another big part of who I am as a person and as a writer. And I try to talk about writers I love overtly, they’re mentioned overtly, or their style is mimicked lovingly here and there. Musicians, I love music is very important to me. And music is very important in this book, it has an outsized presence in the book music, and it was a little bit of like a cabinet of curiosities. I viewed it as that, you know, sort of a little exhibition of things that I loved presented in this loving way.

B&N: The emotional payoff at the end of the book is so significant. And all of these threads, we’ve been talking about the history and the finance and the ego and all of it, the identity. It all pays off in the end, in really spectacular ways. Although it is a very quiet section. Yes, again, no pyrotechnics. But the payoff is so significant. I’m giddy thinking about people getting to read this book in its entirety, because it’s the perfect mix of big ideas, right? We’re talking about the mythology of America, all of the things that come under this mythology of America and the American dream, and how we see it, and how we perceive each other under the rubric of the American dream, and the American mythology, and these characters, even Andrew Bevel who not somebody would necessarily want to sit next to at a dinner party. But at the same time, the way all of these threads come together is really great. So before I let you go, because we are sort of bumping up on our time limits, but why do you write?

HD: It’s a good question. I write because I need to. There is a very visceral, but it’s not sort of a heroic need, but I have that mission or some some kind of, you know, I need to because it gives me pleasure, like nothing else does. I’m always baffled by writers who view writing as a form of martyrdom, you don’t have to do this. To me, it’s those moments where meaning and beauty and emotion come together. That’s what I’m after in life. And it’s something that only literature can deliver. That particular triangulation of meaning that semantic dimension of allowing us to see and understand the world through meaning and words together with emotion together with aesthetic beauty. That’s the experience I quite literally live for.

B&N: And that’s the experience that Trust delivers. As a reader, that is the experience that I got from Trust and from the Rasks and from the Bevels and from Ida.

HD: Oh, you’re gonna make me weep now.

B&N: No, no, no, we don’t have to do that. But that’s why I asked that question, because it’s clear that you were so immersed in this world and everyone speaks for themselves. Every single character speaks for him or herself. And it is a really fantastic experience. I cannot wait for this book to get into the hands of readers everywhere. It is the big idea book that’s driven by great characters great story, and I dare people to put it down.

HD: Very generous. And I loved reading of the book, which was not only generous, but also very keen and insightful. And this has been such a pleasure.

B&N: Oh good. Well, let’s do it again sometime.

HD: Whenever you like.

B&N: Hernan Diaz, thank you so much. Trust is out now and everyone should just go read it. And if you haven’t read In the Distance, it’s unlike anything you’ve read. Yes, it’s kind of a typical western, but also it’s kind of not and that’s all I’m gonna say. But you really should read that as well but read Trust first. Thank you again for joining us Hernan.