Hernan Diazs Trust, a Novel of High Finance
The daughter of eccentric aristocrats marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. That sounds like a plot that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written, or Edith Wharton. But \u201cTrust,\u201d by the writer Hernan Diaz, is very much of our time. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting accounts of the couple\u2019s life, the tycoon Andrew Bevel\u2019s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. And though a book like \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d tends to skirt around the question of how the rich make their money, Hernan Diaz puts that question at the heart of \u201cTrust.\u201d \u201cWhat I was interested in, and this is why I chose finance capital, I wanted a realm of pure abstraction,\u201d he tells David Remnick. Diaz was nearly unknown when \u201cTrust,\u201d his second novel, won the Pulitzer Prize this year.