JLF 2024 | Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz: ‘More than money, trust is primarily concerned with the issue of voice’

Hernan Diaz (left) with Katie Kitamura at Jaipur Literature Festival 2024.

In 2018, Hernan Diaz’s In The Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The bestselling author finally won the prestigious award for his second novel — Trust — in 2023. The Pulitzer Prize statement describe it as — A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.

In a conversation at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival, the author shared with us his idea about the world of money making. Edited excerpts:

2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz at JLF 2024 in Jaipur.

What was your reaction on winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2023 for Trust?

Disbelief, gratitude and joy.

It feels in some way that the book is designed to make some things go over your head, especially if you are not really part of the financial world. Your comment.

That was the intention. Financial discourse is intentionally obfuscated. Take any kind of statement you get, say for your credit card or from your bank or the finance pages in any newspaper. If you are not part of that world, you cannot follow what is being said. This is obviously a power play. Once you learn the basics it is pretty approachable. This is the effect I wanted in the book, for the reader to feel in a friendly, controlled way that this is ‘a little over my head’. That is intentional because I feel it is obviously a power play to keep people away from money matters.

What made you retell the story four times in the book? Why was that structure important to telling this story?

There are two reasons why this formal structure took this particular shape. One has to do with the nature of capital itself which contains multitudes. It’s labour of the multitudes that went into a fortune and I felt that I couldn’t speak about this multitude-ness entity which is wealth from a monolithic point of view. I had to mimic, in scale of course, this sort of polyphonic nature that wealth has. Reason two, is that this book is primarily, even more than money, concerned with the issue of voice. Who has been given a voice, who has a loud voice, who has been silenced throughout history and of course, the voicelessness of women, especially in regards to the big epics of capital. They don’t have a voice; they are not represented in any way. The first woman to get a seat at the New York Stock Exchange did so in the 1970s. Half of the population were effectively excluded from financial matters. A woman couldn’t open a bank account in the United States without a male co-signer till the late 1960s. This is very recent! So instead of monologuing about the issue of voice or voicelessness in the book, I thought it would be much more interesting to have the reader experience what it feels like to be exposed to this loudness or this murmur.

Wealth and money making are absorbing spaces, a world which you can be sucked into. What was your process of immersing yourself in this world of moneymaking and what did you make of it?

I think I have three possible avenues to think about this. The first is the most boring one. People acquire all this money to buy expensive shit or for power. We know that story. It is not interesting to me. The second approach is that there are some people in finance who don’t care about conspicuous consumption and buying ostentatious goods. They are in it because there is something about the math of it, the game dimension of it, the intellectual pursuit that it is that fascinates them. This to me is a little more interesting because even though what they do have serious consequences in the world, there is something there that resembles the drive of an artist. Third, I do feel that capital and wealth is a black hole and it drives us. We are all fascinated by it and it distorts reality around itself, but I feel the effect of this black hole is immense sadness. I mean, here we are. We have been given the gifts of consciousness and language; we can look at the world, talk to one another and marvel at the fact that we exist but instead what you choose to do with that time you have here is to make money? That to me is bonkers!

Author Hernan Diaz.

The title of the book has many implications within the book but does it also apply to the trust the reader has with the writer, in this case, yourself?

Absolutely. Of course, there is the financial dimension of trust which has many different meanings in economics but I am more interested in the notion of monopoly. Who holds a monopoly over truth? Truth is also an effect of trust in a different sense. This relates to the reader as well. Any act of reading involves a tacit contract; terms and conditions you scroll through and hit ‘accept’. I was very interested in inviting readers to question the pre-assumptions on which this trust is built and that is also why there are different genres. Why are we so disinclined to trust fiction? We normally think it is something unmoored from the truth. Why are we so immediately inclined to think that a historical document, which is the second part of the novel, is more related to truth when it can be, and often is, an ideological manipulation. Why are we so inclined to think that a personal diary, like in the fourth and last part, is the truth about the person who wrote it? I wanted to build a certain trust with the reader, demolish it, start again, demolish it, start again, demolish it, start again and demolish it.

Is there a money or wealth related tip/advice you realised while researching for Trust?

I know that a lot of people live month to month and that was me for many years and I take that very seriously. I am not frivolous about this, but if you’re lucky enough to have any kind of savings, realise that no matter in what form they are, it is an investment. If you have cash, you are investing in a currency. So, if you keep it in a box in a drawer, you are now invested in rupees and your money is tied to that currency fluctuation. That for me was an eye opener — that there is no outside and whatever you do, even if you don’t know, it is a form of investment.