A lament for the voiceless

Author Hernan Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his critically acclaimed work ‘Trust’ in 2023. He was troubled by the lack of women’s voices in history, especially when it came to stories related to money and power, he says, adding that it compelled him to write his polyphonic patchwork of a novel.

The money-spinner for the present generation, however, seems to be artificial intelligence, but Diaz is bored by it to the extent that he doesn’t “want to hear another word about it”. Remarkably self-aware and erudite, Diaz centralises in his fiction what’s ailing society.

His commitment to highlighting the mechanisms that silence marginalised voices also shines through. Excerpts from an interview

How important is a literary award to you?

What Pulitzer did for me is that it gave me a lot of joy; it opened up my horizons in ways I never thought. The greatest gift aside from the award itself is that I now find myself in conversation with so many authors who are my heroes, people whom I’ve admired all my life.

Suddenly, there’s this access, and I don’t mean it frivolously. I’m talking about genuine, profound, meaningful connections with these artists whom I love—that was the greatest gift of the award. And I’m not going to lie that it has also given me a certain degree of comfort, at least for a while.

The life of an artist is hard; we make no money, so, for now, I can really focus on writing and not take undesirable jobs, which is good.

But an award doesn’t give you new ideas for books. It doesn’t give you inspiration; it doesn’t give you talent. And it shouldn’t; it’s an award. I have also been a judge at the Pulitzer Prize, so I do understand that it’s not a divine thing. It’s a human institution with human judges, so it’s useful to keep that in mind—awards don’t give you superpowers.

One of the big ideas explored in Trust was privilege. Can this be juxtaposed with the rise of techno-capitalism?

They were super visible back then too. For example, in the 1930s, on the Manhattan side of the river, you had Wall Street with skyscrapers, the tallest buildings in the world, and everything from museums and monuments to capital, art and dissertation, and amazing cars.

The future, you can say; the future had arrived there. On the other side of the river, Brooklyn, where I live, there were horses. Immigrant people were living in pre-modern squallers. The entire family in one room—in tenements; blood traction; extreme degrees of poverty. People were dying from absurd diseases.

They were preventable deaths, all of them. So, the inequality was very much visible even back then. The thing is that we’ve inherited this glamourised myth that those years were the years of opulence for everyone. Not true.

And today, sadly, of course, we’re in a similar position. I see it in New York, which is my hometown; I see it in Jaipur, and I also see it in Europe. Because we are, as a species, greedy.

Tell us a bit about your writing process. How did the structure strike you?

In the case of Trust, I wrote four books within the book, and I wrote one at a time, that is, I wrote one, two, three, and four—that was the order.

The book is about voice to an enormous extent. Who has been voiceless throughout history and who has been given a megaphone throughout history? And it is not shocking to discover that for the entire duration of civilisation on planet Earth, anywhere on the globe, the ones holding the megaphone were men.

So, the book is about the silencing of women, especially in relation to finance, capital, and wealth where they were always absent. So, I thought it’d be much more interesting to have readers experience this issue of voice and to listen to these different voices rather than having me expounding as I’m doing right now, so I tried to enact the issue of the voice formally in Trust. That’s why the book is polyphonic with this layering of four different voices.

Did the work of other writers influence you?

I have a lot of friends who have said on stage on several occasions that they don’t even read fiction while they write their fiction. This is a very common thing. But I’m the exact opposite. When I was writing Trust, I was re-reading a lot of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys — authors from the 1880s, which is where Trust begins, to the 1930s.