This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm Adam Howard in for David Remnick.

The daughter of eccentric aristocrats

marries a Wall Street tycoon during the roaring 20s.

That sounds like a book that F Scott Fitzgerald might have written,

or Edith Wharton, something in the vicinity of the Great Gatsby. But trust, by the writer

Hermann Diaz, is very much of our time.

It's told by four different narrators

who give conflicting accounts of the marital life of the fictional couple

and also of the tycoon's gross misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929.

And while a book like Gatsby or House of Mirth tends to skirt around the question of

how the rich make their money, Ernan Diaz puts the question at the heart of trust.

He's concerned with financial capitalism

and how it works and what's ignored along the way.

The book received the Pulitzer Prize Prize and when David Remnick spoke

with Hernandez last year they began talking about the title trust. I wanted

something that was performing what the book was also doing and saying.

So trust has the value of having sort of all these semantic strata, you know, it's a highly layered word.

And it addresses the financial aspect of the novel, but also what to me, above the issue of capital in the novel it speaks to the issue of

confidence the novel trust is sort of a gentle invitation to to reader to to question these these tacit agreements that we

all enter into every time reader text and this is why we have four voices.

Trust isn't one linear story, it's told in four parts.

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