Biography
Diaz has written two novels, published in more than 20 languages. His essays and short stories have been published in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, and McSweeney's.
He is also the associate director of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, and managing editor of the Spanish-language journal Revista Hispánica Moderna (Modern Hispanic Magazine).
In 2019, he won a Whiting Award, which provides "$50,000 each to ten diverse emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama." The award is provided "based on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior literary work to come."
His second novel, Trust, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. It was also named one of the "10 Best Books of 2022" by The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Publications
This first novel, In the Distance, published in 2017, was also a finalist for the Pulitzer.
Amazon blurb:
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
Publishers Weekly, Feminist Press, PANK, and The Paris Review named it one of the top books of 2017, and Lit Hub named it one of "The 20 Best Novels of the Decade."
It also won a number of other prizes
Publications
Trust, 2022, is described by the Pulitzer committee as:
"A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king."
This novel also won the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction; the New Yorker and Esquire listed it as one of the best books of 2022 and NPR staff included it on a year-end list of books published in 2022 that they "loved."
Book Structure
Trust is a book spun from four narratives:
Bonds: a Novel by Harold Vanner, about Benjamin Rask, a financial baron during the 1929 stock market crash, and his wife Helen. The novel is based on Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred
My Life: Andrew Bevel is his attempt to write his own story, an autobiography in other words
Then A Memoir, Remembered, by Ida Partenza, his secretary
and finally, Futures, the journal, or diary, left by Bevel's deceased wife, Mildred.
For each of these, let's talk about the story, what it tells us, what it adds to the narrative. And let's talk about the characters.
Plot summary: Bonds
This section, a novel within a novel, is a book authored by Harold Vanner, based on the life of Andrew Bevel.
Benjamin Rask is a prestigious American financier from a family of financiers. In middle age, he meets the youthful Helen, a math prodigy who has spent most of her life in Europe. The two marry and while they are not in love they form a mutual respect.
Helen devotes herself to philanthropic work, supporting musical artists.
During the Wall Street crash of 1929 the Rask fortune is untouched. Numerous friends believe that Rask manipulated the market and turn on the Rasks.
Helen becomes ill, with a mental disorder similar to her father's, and is sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Benjamin accompanies her, overseeing her care, while managing his investments in the pharmaceutical company offering treatments.
He allows her to undergo an early form of shock therapy, which kills her.
Bonds--characters
Benjamin Rask
His parents were Wilhemina and Solomon Rask
Helen Brevoort Rask
Her parents were Leopold and Catherine
Question for discussion
Bonds, as the novel within the novel, and first part of this book, sets the stage and introduces the themes that will develop as it progresses. Central to that is Helen's relationship with her parents; although the story tends to focus on her father, Helen's relationship with her mother is equally important.
"She found it almost impossible to do her part in upholding reality. And yet it was this dampened version of herself that her parents preferred—her father followed her uninspired work with great pleasure; her mother found her more approachable." p. 30
How would you describe these characters and their relationships?
Plot summary—My Life
Andrew Bevel, an American financier, begins to write his autobiography focusing on his family of financiers because he recognizes himself in the character of Benjamin Rask.
He credits his marriage to Mildred, an even-tempered woman, to much of his success and describes small ways in which she helped make his home more domestic.
Mildred is eventually diagnosed with cancer and dies, in a sanatorium, in Switzerland.
As this section progresses, the narrative breaks down, including editorial notes about events to include, stories to develop, opinions to insert—and the tone and theme to maintain.
By doing so, he's calling attention to this meta fiction as story.
And by the way, there's another story within a story when Ida creates a "faux" biography to give to the extortionist in her memoir section.
Question for discussion
Bevel is a demanding author of his own biography: he wants his history, his ancestors, prominently included, he wants a specific tone or voice for the text, and he wants a particular image for both himself and his wife. That's Ida's job as ghostwriter.
During her research, Ida goes to the NY Public Library, searching for Vanner's books, he'd written several, and Bonds was a moderate best seller. But she found nothing.
Bevel, one of the Library’s main donors, had bent and aligned reality. (p. 314)
Later she says:
His fortune bent reality around it. This reality included people—and their perception of the world, like mine, was also caught in the gravitational pull of Bevel’s wealth and warped by it. (p. 317)
What do you make of these statements?
Plot summary—A Memoir, Remembered
Ida Partenza's story as secretary/ghostwriter to Andrew Bevel
At 19, with her father no longer able to financially support them, she taught herself typing and shorthand, then applied for jobs—in the capitalist businesses her father despised. After a strange series of interviews, she gets a job with Andrew Bevel, who is pleased with the creative license she used in constructing her own biography.
He's furious about the depiction of himself, and particularly his wife Mildred, in Harold Vanner's novel, Bonds, and wants to "set the record straight" by telling his own story.
Ida becomes increasingly intrigued with Mildred, whom Bevel describes as frail, fragile, and thoroughly domesticated, other than her love of music, a subject he knew nothing about, nor cared.
In Bevel’s autobiography sweet, sickly, sensitive Mildred just loved pretty melodies. . . . In her husband’s condescending characterization Mildred was an endearing dilettante who enjoyed music as other women enjoy crocheting or collecting brooches. (p. 297)
Plot summary—A Memoir, Remembered
Ida wants to know more about Mildred, who was clearly an intelligent and sophisticated woman who in fact created her own philanthropic Charitable Fund. Before the work on the memoir is finished, Bevel dies and Ida goes on to become a secretary and later a novelist.
Interspersed are brief time warps--descriptions of Ida's trip to the Bevel house, in her 70s, now converted to a museum, and her search for Mildred's journals.
In her 70s, researching Mildred, she discovers an uncatalogued diary and steals it.
Other characters:
Ida's father, an Italian American typesetter who adheres to old technology; he's also an anarchist.
Jack, friend to Ida and her father; he and Ida briefly dated; he's also an aspiring journalist who betrays her by following her to Bevel's mansion and later sends the "tieless" man to threaten her. She thinks he has stolen the invented biography of Bevel, but later discovers that her father took the pages.
Questions for discussion
This section focuses on Ida's relationship with her father. How would you describe that?
Is there a connection to her story and to Helen's story about her father?
Questions for discussion
One of the "small" themes in this book is detective fiction.
I put my pen down and looked at Bevel, who was still twirling the salt shaker. That was my story. The retelling of detective novels over dinner. Bevel had read it in my pages. It was one of the scenes I had made up for Mildred, following his request to create homey episodes using my “feminine touch.” I had based it on my dinners with my father, who listened, riveted, to my recounting of the latest Dorothy Sayers or Margery Allingham book I had borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library branch on Clinton Street. And here was Bevel, telling me my story to my face. (p. 345)
Later, over the years, both at work and in my personal life, I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs—as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place. (p. 347)
Why this inclusion of detective fiction?
Questions for discussion
One of the "small" themes in this book is detective fiction.
Now, this was something I had not written into Bevel’s memoir. Pretending not to know who the culprit was and pointing a condescending finger at the obviously wrong suspect was not something I had included in my narrative about Mildred and him.
And yet this is exactly what my father would do each time I retold him one of the novels I had just finished reading. The killer, he invariably said after dutifully following my red herrings, had to be the spoiled stepson or the slighted heiress apparent. It was embarrassing to realize only now that he had merely been humoring me all along.
And it was doubly depressing to see that Bevel’s mind worked just like my father’s: in the fictional world I had created for him, Bevel had added a scene of his making where he reacted to his wife exactly like my father had to me in real life.
Why this inclusion of detective fiction?
Plot summary—Futures
Mildred Bevel, confined to a sanatorium, details her last days before cancer takes her. In her notes Mildred reveals how her husband initially gave her a small sum with which to play the stock market; her investments did better than his.
The two began to collaborate with Andrew playing a forward facing role while Mildred made the decisions. Andrew eventually grew resentful and manipulated the stock market on an off-hand comment Mildred made leading to a break between the two.
Due to Mildred's cancer the two eventually reunite. Mildred feels peace at the possibility of her death and notes that Andrew seems more concerned about himself.
Questions for discussion
One of the entries in Mildred's diaries reads:
Rereading the above “confession” made me think about diaries. Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered long after the diarist’s death, the fossil of an extinct species of one. Others thrive on the belief that the only time each evanescent word will be read is as it’s being written. And others yet address the writer’s future self: one’s testament to be opened at one’s resurrection. They declare, respectively, “I was,” “I am,” “I’ll be.” (p. 375)
What do you make of this comment?
Questions for discussion
Futures is of course the culminating chapter in this book, Mildred's diary. What do we learn from it?
Bells
Bill Sperati's bells
https://wsperati.name/Trust.mp3
Interview—with NPR
Diaz:
Well, the novel is concerned, to a large extent, with the distinction between history and fiction. The idea was to present a novel within the novel, a historical document, a memoir and a personal journal, and recruit the reader as a textual detective of sorts, have them ask themselves how reality itself may be the effect of a textual construction, may be the effect of different narratives.
Diaz, about Andrew Bevel:
I tried at all times to avoid creating a straw man. I tried to give him humanity. I tried to give him certain dignity, despite his actions being so despicable. And I think this comes to light in his private life, in his marriage, because this is not just a sweeping picture of American politics or American finance at the time. It is also very, very much a story about intimacy, a story about marriage with his wife, who is, I would say, the central character of this book.
Interview—with NPR
NPR: And let us talk, then, about Mildred, who dies young and beloved. Did she win a lottery in life to become part of such wealth and be a patron of the arts and a philanthropist, or was she squelched somehow?
DIAZ: Hmm. Well, look; I find reading about wealth in America―both in history and in fiction―women have been completely and utterly erased from those narratives. If they appear in narratives of wealth, it is with mostly three preassigned roles―either as wives, as secretaries, or as victims. And I was interested in taking all these three position―these stereotypical positions―and subverting them.
Interview—with NPR
NPR: Yes. I made a note of something she writes. She says, "I discovered a deep well of ambition within. From it, I extracted a dark fuel." Oh, my word. Those are chilling words.
DIAZ: Well, I wanted to make sure that at no point Mildred was not a victim, was not a sacrificial lamb. And I think the passage that you just quoted shows her agency. And with agency comes responsibility, mistake or the possibility of making mistakes. And I wanted to give her that as well.
DIAZ : The book is, to an enormous extent, about this man who's trying to control a narrative. And this is something that I found about wealth in general and wealth in America in particular. Great fortunes have the ability to distort and warp the reality around themselves. Furthermore, they have the power to align, to bend reality according to their own designs. I think, in fact, the greatest luxury good today out there is not, you know, mansions or yachts. It is reality itself
Interview—with NPR
NPR: I mean, this week in particular, I'm sure it's occurred to you, the richest people in the world - they all happen to be men, by the way - Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos - all own major media platforms.
DIAZ: Of course, there was an intimate and immediate conversation between the book as I was writing it and reality as it unfolded in the newspapers. And I think those men - let's again use that word with great deliberation - that you mentioned are prime examples of this impulse of bending and aligning reality around a great fortune.
And I think we could also tentatively define power as that ability to impose reality onto others.
Interview—The Paris Review
Even though, for obvious reasons, money is at the core of the American literature from that period, it remains a taboo—largely unquestioned and unexplored. I was unable to find many novels that talked about wealth and power in ways that were interesting to me. Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much. And how bizarre is it that even though money has an almost transcendental quality in our culture it remains comparatively invisible in our literature? There are exceptions, of course—Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Gaddis, for example, come to mind—but it’s easy to see a disproportion between the outsized role money plays in the American imagination and the marginal presence it has in our canon.
Moreover, the novels that brush the issue without fully engaging it tend to reproduce the dynamics of the world they supposedly set out to denounce. Most of those books end up bedazzled by the excess they meant to critique, and they also perpetuate a series of exclusions that have always defined the epic of capital, beginning with the exclusion of women, who have often been erased from narratives of accumulation.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: Mildred, in her diary at the end, feels a bit more modern.
DIAZ: That was my hope. She has a very modern sensibility. Before I even started writing it, I thought her section would be a modernist cabinet of curiosities of sorts. The way I described it to myself was that it should sound as if Virginia Woolf had written the Philosophical Investigations. In the end, it doesn’t really sound like that (how could it ever!), but this was the impossible tone I had in mind. There is something in the journal as a form that lends itself to this treatment, and I learned a lot about this genre while reading for this project. I tried to focus on diarists more or less contemporary with my author, such as Dawn Powell, . . . and, of course, Woolf. I also read several personal journals written by the wives of some real-life American tycoons. The experience of going through these files was intense, mostly because in many cases they had never been opened since being archived decades or even a century before.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: Trust is composed of four different books, and in each, the language is very different. The first, for instance, reads a bit like Edith Wharton—were you intentionally trying to mimic the prose of the nineteenth and early twentieth century?
DIAZ: Absolutely. In Wharton and in James, we see the formal precepts of realism taken to their absolute limit—the breaking point before modernism. The traditional nineteenth-century novel aspired, for the most part, to reflect the world objectively. Stendhal famously wrote that the novel is a mirror carried along a road, which sums it all up. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, I think many novelists were turning that mirror away from the road and toward its bearer. Who is looking at the world and how is this observer, too, part of the picture? Eventually, the mirror shattered and the novel found itself looking at the scattered reflections on the shards. As literature no longer was required to reflect a cohesive, unified world, the gaze also began turning inwards. . . . But I think that toward the end of this trajectory, where I would place James and Wharton, the novel is trying to do things that were unimaginable a few decades earlier.
Interview—The Paris Review
DIAZ: More than accurately depicting objective reality, the emphasis was on conveying certain forms of experience. More than capturing social “types”, the novel became increasingly invested in selfhood and difference—not in archetypes but in what is untransferable about each individual experience. This, of course, came with immense formal shifts. I don’t think the syntactical opacity in James’s late work, for example, is irrelevant in this context—it enacts the difficulties of seeing and knowing life only through language; it shows us how hard it is to reach the world. But I don’t feel he ever fully broke with the novel as a form. He was, rather, making it do things for which it wasn’t designed at that point. And this is so beautiful to me. We may hear something similar, also, in certain Romantic music that holds on to a Classical vocabulary to express what can’t be conveyed through it. We may see it in painters who, while still being figurative, teetered on the edge of abstraction—because figurative accuracy was no longer accurate enough. I’m very interested in those transitional moments in art. It’s not by coincidence that the last section of the novel is so invested, both formally and in its subject matter, in the avant-garde and high modernism.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: At one point, Ida’s father, an Italian anarchist who works as a typesetter, gives a speech in which he calls money a fiction, going on to say, “History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army … Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.” Were you trying to probe this relationship between art and commerce?
Diaz: Obviously, this is true. But it’s important to remember that the reverse is also true: power relies heavily on narratives to perpetuate itself. Political and financial supremacy is simply not possible without a collection of myths to prop it up. This is why I think fiction can teach us a lot about history and politics. One of the premises of Trust is that the relationship between power and art is not as linear as many so-called engaged novels would like us to believe. I’ve always found the idea of engaged or committed literature suspicious, because it subordinates literature to some higher truth. If anything, I’d like to invert the terms in the discussion around mimesis and representation: rather than asking how literature can accurately imitate life, I’m interested in how reality can be shaped by fiction.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: In the third section of the book, there’s an emphasis on another very American experience, that of immigration—Ida, the section’s narrator, is the child of an Italian immigrant and was raised in an Italian immigrant enclave in Brooklyn. What were you considering when you wrote that section?
DIAZ: Immigration is a central concern for me because I am an immigrant. I also happen to be half Italian. My maternal great-grandparents went from Campania to Buenos Aires, but they could just as easily have ended up in New York. Not by chance, the Italian immigration wave that started in the 1880s coincided with one of the greatest periods of economic expansion in US history. On one side of the East River, there was a world of incalculable wealth and skyscrapers. On the other side, immigrants were living in utterly pre-modern conditions and completely segregated. In fact, the parallels between that reality and ours were shocking and devastating. I wrote most of the novel during the Trump presidency.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: In the third section of the book, there’s an emphasis on another very American experience, that of immigration—Ida, the section’s narrator, is the child of an Italian immigrant and was raised in an Italian immigrant enclave in Brooklyn. What were you considering when you wrote that section?
DIAZ: While I was reading about the Immigration Act of 1924 that barred most Italians and Asians from entering the country, Trump was proposing mass deportations, enacting travel bans, and separating children from their families at the border. This is just one of the many ways in which the Republican policies of the 1920s mirror those of the 2020s. Calvin Coolidge’s appalling record is usually forgotten in favor of fizzier legends from the jazz age.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: How did you conceive of Ida? How did you see her in relation to these histories of exclusive immigration policy and rampant capitalism?
Diaz: Ida, the daughter of an Italian anarchist, starts working on Wall Street as a secretary. A central concern of Trust is how women have been, for the most part, suppressed from all the narratives spun around capital. If given any role at all, it has been either that of wife or secretary—or victim. Trust takes these stereotypical roles, subverts them, and moves them from the periphery to the center of the narrative. Ida follows a new path toward economic independence that opened to women in the twenties and thirties, when they joined the white-collar labor force. This was a major revolution that transformed the workspace and destabilized gender roles in society at large.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: How did you conceive of Ida? How did you see her in relation to these histories of exclusive immigration policy and rampant capitalism?
Diaz: In her section of the novel, Ida looks back on her youth in the thirties from the vantage point of 1985, after a long and successful career as a writer. Finding Ida’s tone was quite challenging. It’s the section that was most heavily edited because she and I are very different writers, and I had to learn to inhabit her voice. I created strict style guides for every section, but that part of the book was very demanding. Among other things, I read a lot of New Journalism while trying to teach myself Ida’s syntax and punctuation.
Interview—The Paris Review
Q: There’s a line that Mildred writes towards the end of the book, in her diary, “A diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies.” Do you think that’s true for the novelist as well?
DIAZ: I love this question. I never thought about it but think this may be true for me. Writing is a monstrous act because it implies a metamorphosis. Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else. Every novel is a long way of tracing an x, of crossing myself out. I don’t want to be on the page. I want someone else to be there—someone else to “happen.” Still, despite my best efforts, I always remain, deformed and disfigured. The final paradox, of course, is that I am the one striking myself out. And isn’t this duality also quite monstrous?
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
NO CLASS NEXT WEEK