Hernan Diaz On Conflicting Storylines And The Perception Of Truth In Trust

Hernan Diaz, the author of Trust – Service95 Book Club’s March Monthly Read, discusses the narratives we tell about ourselves, our own origin story and the formal challenges of writing in four voices...

Who are you? The answer, whatever it may be, will always take the shape of a story. This means, strangely perhaps, that we are a story. In quite a strict sense, our identity is the sum of narratives we tell about ourselves. Yet things get complicated rather quickly, because others also have their stories about us – and these stories will most likely not fully match the ones we tell about ourselves. So perhaps we (each one of us) are the aggregate of the tales told about us: this includes our own accounts but also gossip, falsehoods and even truths that remain invisible to ourselves. What I call ‘I’ is a collection of versions about my life. And my voice is, at the end of the day, just one more in that choral arrangement.

If we believe the above to be at least partially true, it would only be natural to apply this same principle to our family, to our community, to our country, to our history. To reality itself. And this, to a large extent, is what Trust is about: the realisation that we and our circumstances are polyphonic in nature – literally, made up by many voices. The thing, however, is that while some of these voices are thunderous (which doesn’t make them necessarily true), others are barely audible.

Trust narrates the ascent of one of the wealthiest couples in the world. Every great fortune always surrounds itself with a great myth or a heroic saga of its own origin, which normally involves a strong-willed man who, by the sheer force of his ingenuity and hard work, prevails over adversity and reshapes the world. Trust, however, wants to listen to the voices behind this classic myth – the voices that have usually been excluded and silenced in the great epics of capital. It should not come as a surprise that those consistently suppressed from these heroic tales of finance have been women.

Instead of merely thematising the distortion or silencing of these voices, I thought it would be much more interesting if the reader were able to feel the difference between these narratives. This is why Trust is composed of four different sections, written in different genres, by different authors, in completely different tones.

The first part, ‘Bonds’, is a whole novel-within-the-novel, penned by a fictional author in the 1930s. The second section, ‘My Life’, is a fragmentary historical document where we meet the real tycoon on whom the fictional one in ‘Bonds’ was based: he is unhappy with how he’s been depicted in the novel and is determined to set the record straight. The third part, ‘A Memoir, Remembered’, is written 50 years later by the real-life tycoon’s secretary. As she looks back on her life, she finds the personal diary of the tycoon’s wife, which makes up ‘Futures’ – the fourth and final section of Trust.

Novel.

Historical document.

Memoir.

Personal diary.

Each one of these genres has a very specific relationship to truth – and Trust is an invitation to revisit the tacit contracts we sign each time we read a text, and also to consider why we are so eager to assume that some stories are more reliable than others.

Trust presented many formal challenges. Among the greatest was that of making these four voices believable. Each one of these fictional authors had to feel like a real person. This implied, first of all, extensive archival work. I read a lot of primary sources (documents from the time) about finance, monetary and fiscal policy, interior decoration, chamber music, Italian anarchism, psychiatry, New York history, Swiss sanatoriums and modernist aesthetics and philosophy. I also went through countless archival boxes containing the personal papers of the wives of real-life tycoons from that period – and how poignant it was to discover that, in many cases. their notebooks and diaries had remained untouched (and their voices unheard) for a century… Secondly, to make these texts credible, each one of them had to be tonally unique. This took a lot of editing and required figuring out the syntax, cadence and idiosyncrasies of each author. In fact, I ended up creating four different style guides detailing the sentence structure, punctuation and word choices of each one of these fictitious writers. The third and last component was, to be honest, imagination. Literature is ultimately an act of the imagination, and the final challenge was to conjure up, as vividly as I possibly could, every smallest detail about these authors’ peculiarities – including those that never made it onto the page.

These four voices conform what I hope will be read as a choral novel, and the reader is the conductor of this choir. It is up to the reader to decide how these four voices come together (or not) to emphasise the different counterpoints, and to highlight the consonances and dissonances between them. Somewhere, in the meeting of these voices – and, also, in the silences between them – we may hear the always faint and elusive ring of truth.