Hernan Diaz’s latest novel, Ply, is a speculative epic set in a decaying city, where a series of upheavals have depopulated this “shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur.” While the time and location are never spelled out, the evidence strongly suggests a version of New York City several centuries into the future. Diaz’s previous novel, Trust, won the Pulitzer prize and was both critically and commercially successful.
A rewilded metropolis
The rewilded city is depicted with more than a flavour of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World: lynx and deer stalk the streets, and there is “the downtown swamp where the blind limbs and tendrils of trees and climbers have been at work for ages pulling the last line of collapsing buildings down into the spongy soil under the water.” Beyond the city, a more technologically sophisticated life endures, evidenced by monopolistic companies Flow and Tensor, which control water and electricity respectively, and CTS, an unexplained acronym for a private security company that “holds a monopoly over monitoring and patrolling of the streets.”
At street level, the city’s resourceful inhabitants live on their wits, bartering recycled goods, trading stimulants, food and other products. The novel’s narrator-protagonist is a pincher, someone who steals electricity from the grid. Like the city, she is never given a name—a strange bit of reticence in a novel that is generally eager to explain everything.
An apprenticeship in scarcity
Raised by her parents in a second-hand bookshop—“one of the last shops of its kind in town”—the narrator loses first her father and then her mother, though not before her mother, a tinker, trains her in the art of recycling broken objects. In a world of scarcity, these skills are much in demand. The details of the narrator’s apprenticeship manage to be simultaneously lengthy and vague. She lovingly recalls her mother creating “spectacularly time-consuming and comically complex contraptions.” At one point, she also repairs a blender.
Forced to fend for herself, the narrator spends time with gentle druggie Nelson, then utopian visionary Acevedo, who supervises her training as a tinker until she leaves to follow her doomed love interest Sol and find her true calling as a pincher.
Big ideas, dry execution
Interspersed with chapters of backstory, the real action follows the narrator as she makes a living supplying stolen electricity to the city’s thriving independent music scene. On one expedition, she realises she’s being followed. Her technical accomplishments have caught the eye of Pola, a lone female scientist who quotes Heraclitus and lives in the basement of what is probably the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pola is “convinced that we need to reconsider the meaning, reach and very nature of reason itself.” She is at work on something that she claims will “alter the fabric of reality itself.” There are many long explanations of how this laser plasma particle accelerator might work: “if we managed to entangle this particle with countless others in an ever-expanding arborescence, we could play with these superpositions and reorganise spacetime with total deliberation.”
The second half of the book becomes, broadly speaking, a heist in which the narrator tries to steal a massive amount of power from the grid to fire up Pola’s machine. The plot is complicated by a young girl called Ines; two baddies called Kenneth and Leslie; evil scientist Casey; a scenester called Harlow, a nod at Andy Warhol; and Anton, a trader from Bulgaria who talks like a character in an Oscar Wilde play. There is also variation between third- and first-person narration as Diaz teases with the notion that the narrator has broken through to a non-dual perception of reality where the boundary between self and other dissolves.
Big ideas—quantum mechanics, political economy, non-duality—crowd out the human drama that would give the story life. Characters make long speeches and die suddenly. There’s something simplistic and complacent in the narrator’s view that some form of human progress is being hatched by the community struggling to live in the depopulated city. These convictions are never put under pressure. The novel’s antagonists are one-dimensional villains, not human beings pursuing their own idea of the good life.
The biggest problem of all is that Ply is a very dry biscuit, with lots of exposition but little in the way of narrative energy. In one of her rare moments of doubt, the narrator looks at Pola’s machine and wobbles as she sees “an abstract monument to an incomprehensible idea.” It’s an accurate summation of this novel. Ply by Hernan Diaz is published by Picador (£20).
