Scala Radio Book Club: Trust by Hernan Diaz
Last updated 15th Aug 2022
In the Scala Radio Book Club this week, Mark Forrest chatted to Hernan Diaz on his brand-new novel Trust, which is currently longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022.
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth-all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?
This is the mystery at the centre of Bonds, a successful 1938 novel that all of New York seems to have read. But there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz's Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with each other and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans an entire century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
As the novel has a focus on extreme wealth and privilege, Mark wondered, ‘Does this fascination of wealth come from the American Dream? The fact that we could all potentially share this story of coming from nothing, into this extraordinary wealth?’
‘I think the American dream is first and foremost the ability to accumulate wealth,’ said Hernan. ‘This is something, of course, that I take issue with and thought ought to be explored. What I've noticed in the United States, and perhaps in the U.K. too, is that money and capital play an immense role in how these nations imagine themselves. Yet at the same time, there is a certain Britishness around the issue of money. It's absolutely crucial in our lives and in our histories, but it's something that is not spoken about. I realize, furthermore, that there are very few novels that deal with money-making. And this blind spot, to me, was very productive.’
Mark asked, ‘How do you feel about the making of this extreme wealth, and those individuals that control it, and the way in which it controls them?’
‘There are two aspects at the core of the novel,’ said Hernan. ‘One is how great fortunes have this gravitational pull. They're almost like black holes that distort the reality around themselves. This to me is very interesting how immense fortunes have the ability to reshape reality and control the narrative. So this is one of the aspects that I was interested in in the novel.
The second one is that these myths of capital are devoid of women. There are just simply no women in these tales. This is something that I wanted to address. So the great protagonists of these four books are actually women.’
Hernan Diaz’s first novel In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Trust has already been Booker Prize longlisted. Mark was interested to know how this recognition has changed Hernan’s life. ‘From these awards, do you feel that you've done it, you've made it?’ asked Mark.
‘Never, no!’ said Hernan. ‘You never make it in literature, as far as I'm concerned. Literature is perpetual, and you're always making. It's never in the past tense. It's always. It's pure process. It's doing, doing, doing.’
Kate Winslet is set to star in a short series adaptation of Trust on HBO. Mark finished the interview asking Hernan, ‘As Executive Producer, how is the process of turning a book into a TV series going?’
‘Oh, it's been wild. I've been in the book world in some capacity or another for my entire adult life, but the film world is a different kind of universe.
I met with a lot of people but in the end, when I spoke with Kate Winslet, it was just her intelligence and artistic sensibility that did it. She has such a deep understanding of the cinematic form. And I also love her work. So, it was an easy choice to make. We're in touch and we're exchanging ideas, and the whole project is taking shape very quickly, which is delightful to witness and be a part of.’
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