Tucked away in a corner of Brooklyn’s Othmer Library, Hernan Diaz waves his hand over a shelf of 19th-century land records. The author is in his element. This stately room filled with black ash woodwork has long been one of his favorite haunts, but today is his first time back since the Center for Brooklyn History closed to the public during the pandemic. COVID protocol is still in effect—no touching the books. He longingly gestures toward a stack of old maps.

The library has granted Diaz a private visit for an interview about his new novel, Trust, published by Riverhead Books this week. Diaz burst onto the literary scene in 2017 when his first novel, In the Distance, made its way from the slush pile at a small press to the short list for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, for the literary equivalent of his major-label debut, he has written a genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ‘20s and Great Depression. Technically, Diaz is an author of historical fiction, insofar that his books are set in the past. It is perhaps more accurate, however, to call him a literary myth-buster, a writer who breaks down and reexamines classic American narratives. In the Distance tackled the Western from uncanny new angles, and Trust unpacks the stories we tell ourselves about money, what they capture, and what they exclude.

Diaz lives about one mile and 100 years from the world of his new novel. On a tour of Carroll Gardens, he points out the street where some of his characters live, historic landmarks, and iconic Italian American bakeries. You might think that living within walking distance of a novel’s setting would impact the project, especially after writing a Western set in a distant American wasteland. But for Diaz, years are more important than miles.

“When we think of context, we think of space. So sure, I could go to Nevada or take the subway to Wall Street,” he says. “But there’s a second coordinate that’s usually left out, which is time. I am irretrievably removed from New York in the 1930s, and being here in the same place doesn’t bridge that enormous gap.” Diaz gets his bearings through research. When working on a novel, he exclusively reads material related to the project; the books in the Othmer Library are infinitely more important to his process than site visits. 

This relationship to place seems related to Diaz’s own global background. He was born in Argentina, but his parents fled to Sweden as political refugees when he was two. His mother was a psychoanalyst and his father was a photographer, filmmaker, and active member of a Trotskyist political group. Both were committed leftists, and together they ran a bookstore selling texts that would be banned after the right-wing coup of 1976. When the military overthrew Isabel Perón’s government (with an assist from Henry Kissinger), friends and family of Diaz’s parents started disappearing. When they started receiving suspicious phone calls themselves, his parents knew it was time to go. They sold everything they could and moved to Stockholm.

As a result, Diaz spent his early years in Sweden among his family’s circle of political exiles. When the situation in Argentina was safer, his family returned, but Diaz felt an international itch he needed to scratch. “At some point in my life I made the decision that I wanted to live in English,” he says. He has only ever written fiction in English, and he speaks the language with the exquisitely precise vocabulary of the multilingual. Following undergraduate work in Argentina, he moved to London, and then, in 1999, to Brooklyn. Living in a semiderelict old factory in Williamsburg, he took graduate seminars from Jacques Derrida at New York University before embarking on an academic career. That led him to Columbia, where he still edits Revista Hispánica Moderna, a distinguished journal. 

Diaz had built a full life in academia when he submitted a manuscript to Minneapolis’s Coffee House Press. “When I wrote In the Distance, I didn’t have anything. I was just a guy with a notebook and a pen,” he recalls. A book that could only have leapt from Diaz’s brain, it tells the story of a hulking Swede named Håkan who treks from west to east across 19th-century America in search of his lost brother. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Suddenly, Diaz had an entrée to New York’s literary establishment, with “a moment of disorientation” and big expectations to boot.

Still, Diaz didn’t waste much time before jumping back into writing. Work on Trust began in 2018. Books come to Diaz in scenes, and Trust was born from a poignant one: a wealthy man gazing out from a high-rise office at a welder who cannot look back. “It was related to In the Distance, because it’s also about loneliness,” says the author. “There was a continuity there that was meaningful to me. Just as with In the Distance there was something unresolved with the Western genre in the American canon and its relationship with American history, I started thinking that something similar happened with wealth.” 

Trust, says Diaz, explores “wealth and this paradoxical relationship between the extreme isolation and extreme reach that come with it.” The book opens with a novel within the novel called Bonds, a story in the style of Edith Wharton about a powerful financier and his brilliant, somewhat mysterious wife. Think HBO’s The Gilded Age, plus 30-ish years and actual intrigue and verve. Then comes an exploration of the world behind Bonds: the fictional characters who inspired metafictional characters, and the fictional journalist who wrote about them. These are Andrew and Mildred Bevel, the couple at the apex of the city’s (and the world’s) financial food chain, and Ida Partenza, a successful magazine journalist who began her career by maneuvering from her immigrant community in Brooklyn to Bevel’s employ. Diaz deploys multiple styles throughout Trust: the society novel, the bloated memoirs you find from ex-presidents, literary long-form, Robert Walser–esque fragments. They all coalesce into a portrait of the rich and, just as importantly, their riches.

“Serious money,” Diaz explains, “has the ability to distort reality. Given enough mass, it will ripple. There will be an event horizon, almost like a black hole. It affects time, it affects perception, and it will suck everything into it.” Diaz thinks American literature has largely failed to grapple with this dimension of wealth and its reliance on appropriated labor. In most books, wealth is “more like a treasure, like a pirate’s chest,” he says. “It’s something that’s there almost magically.” Diaz wanted to dig into where fortunes come from, how people build them, and how they can influence everything from literary salons to global markets.

“There is this priggishness around moneymaking,” says Diaz. “It’s this enormous paradox in American history, between this priggishness and this hyperfetish around money. Repression and exultation, simultaneously.”

He name-checks a few authors who have tried to tackle the subject of wealth accumulation: Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser. I offer up The Great Gatsby and he visibly suppresses a shudder. “I’m uneasy talking about Gatsby. People love it, I just dislike the book,” he says. “But beyond my dislike, which is totally subjective and ultimately irrelevant, it is not about the things that I’m interested in. It’s not about the labyrinth of capital and how it can structure reality around itself. Nick is a bondsman, and that’s all we know.”

Where other novels glaze over the particulars of moneymaking, Trust gets into it. Diaz never actually names a set dollar amount, but the book is littered with financial maneuvers. Characters inherit wealth, monitor markets over ticker tape, invest in commodities and foreign currencies. To master the banking language of the era, he immersed himself in back issues of Forbes and Fortune from the late ’20s and early ’30s. In Trust, you are always aware that the money comes from someone, somewhere.

Diaz wanted to tackle another form of erasure in Trust as well. “When we talk about money and power entwined, it’s a womanless world. They’ve been utterly erased from these narratives,” he says. “That to me was extremely meaningful and demanded some sort of intervention, because it’s an intentional deletion.” The women in Diaz’s new novel are its smartest and most compelling characters. Ida Partenza, the Italian American journalist, is a savvy narrator who brings Diaz’s historical research into the story. She lives at home with her radical anarchist father (a character heavily inspired by Diaz’s own father) in Brooklyn, but finds her way into a powerful job in Andrew Bevel’s orbit across the river. Bevel wants to construct a counternarrative to the image of the financier in Bonds, and he needs Partenza to do it. So, like Diaz, Ida consumes “a robust diet of memoirs of ‘Great Men’” to understand the voice of New York power brokers and the opacity of financial language. She comes to understand Bevel better than he understands himself.

The real heart of Trust, however, is Mildred Bevel, the banking titan’s enigmatic partner. At first, she seems like a sickly aesthete, a Park Avenue wife with a penchant for arts philanthropy. As the novel unfolds, though, it becomes clear that something else is going on. A mathematical savant with a modern sensibility, she is always held just out of the reader’s (and Ida’s) reach. 

Both Ida and Mildred are drawn into wealth’s black hole. In marrying Andrew Bevel, Mildred finds herself drawn behind a curtain. Ida, meanwhile, must confront the seductions of Bevel’s world, filled with town cars, envelopes of cash, and what she calls “the cool rush of luxury.” “It’s hard to be immune to that,” says Diaz. “If we’re all honest, a lot of your critical armor falls off.”

There’s an irony behind Trust that is not lost on Diaz. His novel critiquing extreme wealth was written in rooms built and maintained by extreme wealth. The Center for Brooklyn History received part of a $20-million grant from the Carnegie Corporation. When the center closed during the pandemic, Diaz walked from his apartment to the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, where he was supported on a fellowship. He just recently returned from a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center at Lake Como. It’s a rich man’s world, we all live in it, and Diaz gets to write in it.

In that regard, the world of Trust feels very close to our own. Wealth distorting reality? We live at a time when the ultrawealthy fly to outer space and swap companies like they’re haggling at the farmer’s market. “I don’t want to pollute this conversation by naming any current billionaires,” says Diaz, but he acknowledges the connection. This book is a reminder that wealth isn’t a treasure chest and the rich aren’t magical, no matter how dramatically they shape the world. It’s all just money, made by real people, with very real, often dangerous implications.

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