Hundreds of years in the future, the United States is long gone, utterly fragmented. What used to be New York City is a collection of communities where people survive – and sometimes thrive, creating art and music – but the old buildings and roadways are being consumed again by nature. There are virtually no social services; few people live to old age and the birthrate is dwindling.
Welcome to Hernan Diaz’s “Ply,” a complicated, multi-layered novel. It starts off with a straightforward story about life in this brave new world while examining the role of technology and the way those in and out of power wield it before morphing into a book about self and identity and connection through a deep dive into particle and quantum science.
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We also hear about life in the more affluent Great Lakes and the Valley, which Diaz says is “regressive and conservative, a continuation of what we have now but exacerbated – the class structure is more of a caste structure, with systematic selfishness.” But the novel stays squarely in the lower-class world of New York, where most people can’t even read anymore.
The protagonist is an unnamed “pincher,” someone who pinches electricity from the grid, which is controlled by a private company; she often uses it to provide electricity for the punk musicians performing around the city. She is literate, having grown up in a bookstore owned by her parents, but now she’s an orphan, as are most people in the city. She is also ambitious and creative and the “bricks” she designs for transporting electricity are in demand, keeping her busy and leading her to the precipice of real opportunity and real trouble.
Diaz doesn’t write autobiography, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Trust” is present in these pages – his parents were radicals who owned a bookshop in Argentina before fleeing when he was two to Sweden after a right-wing coup. (They returned years later after democracy was restored.) He loves music and even paid for grad school (he has a PhD from NYU) by playing and teaching music. And New York has been his home for nearly 30 years.
Diaz normally does Zoom interviews in front of a huge bookcase in his Brooklyn home, but because his daughter had fallen asleep in that room, he discussed his new book in a teenager’s room filled with posters.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You write linearly, polishing each sentence before moving on, and then you don’t really go back afterwards. How does that work?
I’m really not a novelist. I’m a writer of sentences. If I’m lucky, those sentences coalesce into a novel, but the unit I care the most about is the sentence. People don’t often think about the prose itself, the materiality of language, the plasticity of the medium used. I put a lot of pressure on each sentence. With each sentence I’m asking, “Is this sentence doing more than one thing at once?”
Q. You don’t like plotting out your books; how did the characters surprise you?
Because I write so slowly, the characters have time to coalesce. I hope this doesn’t sound too mystical, but I can see them rising from the page. But the surprises are always in language more than in behavior or plot twists and turns, even though I love those and try to have them in my books. But for me it has to do more with finding the texture of each voice.
Q. How did this evolve from a book about technology to one about self and identity?
I don’t think of “Ply” as a science fiction novel – it’s a novel about science, a different thing.
“Frankenstein” is a very important book for me. If you’re thinking about the depiction of science in literature, you have to go there. One thing I admire about it is how clean the premise is – how to create life from dead matter – even though the philosophical, ontological, moral implications of this are enormous. Arrogantly and presumptuously, I was looking for something as clean and as powerful. It took years and I couldn’t quite nail it.
I was reading science and became very interested in particle physics – it’s the most rigorously proven, empirically proven paradigm, yet it goes against our everyday experience of the world. My version of a clean premise became: If space-time is granular and if I can access these grains and modify them, then I can change reality. That led to the question of who I am in relation to this particle and how does my perceiving it affect it? So what started out being a novel about technology ended up being a novel about selfhood, consciousness, identity, and really how two beings may hope to interact. But this was not the plan.
Q. Did your ideas about identity and self inform the novel or did putting pen to paper change the way you thought about them?
My idea really doesn’t quite exist until it is on the page. It’s vaporous and elusive. Writing the actualization of an idea in language, in particular, lexical choices, is a sharpening of that idea. It is in and through language that an idea becomes, in fact, an idea.
May I caboose this with something? We’re talking about big words and big concepts, but the main technology that we have to apprehend reality and convey it to others is language. The language that you speak shapes your perception of reality. And fiction is the absolutely best machine that humans have devised to have a glimpse of what it means to be someone else, of inhabiting someone else’s consciousness.
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Q. Music is central to the book, so what were you listening to while you wrote?
The simplest answer would be instrumental music that is very repetitive. I’m very interested in repetition in music and fiction. In “Ply,” we have the repetition of subjectivities and doppelgangers and so forth. And I always put in passages that are repeated verbatim that I’m hoping readers won’t pick up on. I like doing that. I don’t know why.
I listen to a lot of Johann Sebastian Bach as I write. I listen to his harpsichord pieces, the two books of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” over and over again, the Art of Fugue, and his six suites for keyboard. I have a vast collection of different versions. I write a lot in public spaces and there’s something about the frequency of the harpsichord that demolishes everything around you and creates this kind of cone.
I also listened to minimalist composers like Morton Feldman – it’s kind of static music but very slowly, suddenly you find yourself elsewhere, almost miraculously. I love that effect and I try to have it in my prose.
But for this particular novel, I also have a playlist that’s almost nine hours long of instrumental punk and post-punk music and electronic music, mostly from the late ’70s and early ’80s from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Q. Does the pincher relish the “savage” beauty and unruliness of her world because she’s young or because it’s a world with no rules and little hope of old age?
So many of the characters only get to experience youth; there is no foresight. You’re young, and then you’re gone. That is terrible, but it’s also very punk – live fast, die young – which is the ethos of their world. Needless to say, I don’t agree: I’m a middle-aged bald gentleman and a parent of a teenage daughter. But intellectually it was appealing. I wanted to know more about that intensity and relentlessness, that Nietzschean way of being, where there is no guilt, no consequences.
In the punk scene of New York and London and Manchester in the 1970s and ’80s, you had that same sense of precariousness in these cities. You also had nature reclaiming buildings and squatters and collectives and sub-economies and a flourishing art scene and a sense of freedom. It must have been thrilling but it came at a great cost. It’s a terrible thing when the social safety network collapses, which we’re seeing now on a global scale.
Q. Some activists in the book advocated for returning a centralized state in some form while others preferred the fragmentation and relying on individual connections without a state that is patriarchal, imprisons the poor and unfairly rewards the wealthy. Which side would you be on?
I have a complicated history of intense activism in my family, especially my father. So I understand the urge, the fire and the promise. But I also see the shortsightedness of so many of those ambitions where perhaps too little thought had been given to what would happen after the fire. In 2026, I think what we have achieved politically and socially since the American Revolution is worth preserving. I don’t believe in destroying what we so patiently – and imperfectly – have built. And we’re not done. There are a lot of systemic injustices but we don’t need to destroy the whole system.
But where I would stand four hundred years in the future, I don’t know. I’d probably be more radical.
Hernan Diaz in conversation with Percival Everett
When: 7 p.m., October 8
Where: Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 East Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
Information: Call (626) 449-5320 or go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hernan-diaz-with-percival-everett-discusses-and-signs-ply-tickets-1990666167093
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