Then we settled in to talk about his work.īRIAN CASTLEBERRY: Trust is a significant departure from your first novel, In the Distance. We spent a few minutes catching up on the COVID years and sharing our worries about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which had only begun a few days before. Diaz, in a comfortable-looking gray sweatshirt, sat before an impressive library that runs to the high ceiling of his family’s Brooklyn apartment, a pair of William Gaddis novels looming just over his right ear. Illuminating in its examination of power and economic history, it is also deeply human - and written with such precision and poetry that even its surprises appear etched in fine marble. Told through multiple texts that revise and break down its story, Trust unfolds its various parts to reveal a greater, more complex whole, taking an almost cubist view of early 20th-century business tycoon Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred, two characters eternally wrestling with the public and private narratives that have defined them. Trust, the new novel by Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize finalist for In the Distance (2017), is one of the finest examples of this type of work, and one that could hardly be timelier. It is a machine that helps us see our now with greater clarity. Where Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (2021) can be said to be set in the 1970s, Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors (2020) is a work that is about history itself - about the fissures in our agreed-upon narratives, about power and guilt and individuality in the sweep of time, and about (however obliquely) the present day. I AM PARTIAL TO, and personally invested in, a kind of fiction that looks at history the same way we look at ideas - not simply as a setting for characters to inhabit but as a series of concepts we’re all trying to understand, the author included.
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