This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The daughter of eccentric aristocrats marries a Wall Street tycoon during the roaring 20s.

It all sounds like a book that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written, or maybe Edith Wharton, something in the vicinity of the Great

Gatsby or the House of Mirth. But trust by Hernan Diaz is very much of our time. It's a novel told

by four different narrators who give conflicting accounts of the

marital life of a 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 the House of Murth tends to skirt around the

question of how the rich actually make their money, Hernan Diaz puts that question

at the very heart of trust. He's concerned with finance capitalism and how it works and what's

ignored along the way. The book received a Pulitzer Prize this year, and I asked Hernan

Diaz 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 the reader

to question these tacit agreements that we all enter into every time we read a text.

And this is why we have four voices.

As I mentioned, trust isn't one linear story. It's told in four parts.

One part is a work of fiction, a book within a book,

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