The staircase goes down much further than a building that size should allow. Lamps are set too far apart, so the descent is a sequence of small islands of light with hungry distances between, and the air cleans and cools with every step. At the bottom, behind lead-lined doors, an old woman throws a switch and turns on a ceiling of glowing panels over a basement larger than the museum above it. Rails for moving heavy equipment. Cranes. Workstations that cost a fortune. Also cobwebs, rust, a derailed wagon nobody could lift back on, a scorch mark hidden behind panels, and a filthy mattress where she sleeps in short bursts. Ply by Hernan Diaz wants you to hold both halves of that room at once, because it will not tell you which one is true.
The woman who has been brought down there is about twenty-five and is never named. She steals electricity for a living. Generations before she was born the state stopped functioning and then stopped existing; what survived the sell-off was a company that owns the power and a company that owns the water. Security is a service loyal to whoever pays, and beneath it an unpaid militia enforces repealed laws out of enthusiasm. Most people cannot read words and communicate in pictures. Almost nobody reaches forty.
Two Meanings of Power in Ply by Hernan Diaz
The pun is in English and the novel builds its entire architecture on it without once pointing at it. Every scene about tapping a cable is also a scene about who gets to give orders, and the two never come apart.
This is why the opening chapters are so good. Ply by Hernan Diaz does not explain its catastrophe. No plague chapter, no war, no date. What we get instead is a working economy, described from inside by somebody who has to eat: how many battery charges a sack of nails is worth, why solar panels are pointless when they will be stolen in a circle until ownership cannot be established, which of the three collapsing bridges will still take a truck. Guards will stroll past a mugging without slowing down, since muggings are nobody’s billable problem, and then hunt a power thief with a personal fury that no contract asked of them.
Our narrator learned the trade from a man who would have called her current life a betrayal. He ran a workshop out of an abandoned health club, stored his components in a drained swimming pool, and preached that technology set free from ownership could still save everybody. His charge against her is the sharpest sentence in the book: the thief creates the owner. Stealing from the company is the strongest argument anyone could make that the company owns the thing.
The Broker, the Safe and the Chains
Groups will argue about the physicist and love Anton. He is the broker who moves our narrator’s batteries, self-declared Bulgarian, possibly a fantasist, with a heavy accent that slips whenever he forgets to maintain it. He holds court at a desk placed like an altar at the end of a looted bank, so he can size up anyone crossing the hall and slip out the back if needed. And he punishes a man who sold him flour cut with plaster by making him buy it back at his own quoted price, and calls that elegant.
Every evening he closes his vault by threading chains through the spokes of the dead mechanism in patterns he finds beautiful, then steps back to admire the needlework before fixing the padlocks. Remember that, because Ply by Hernan Diaz sets its images up a long way in advance and never reminds you they are coming.
The other great pleasure runs quietly underneath everything: the city being taken back. Deer pick down an avenue, hooves tapping and sliding. Coyotes watch from a stoop. Ospreys surface with baffled trout. Bears keep a whole district empty by turning up for acorns each autumn, which is why the best venue in town is a salt shed nobody has entered in decades. None of it is mourned. Our narrator finds the place lovelier as a ruin than in photographs of its heyday, and one character calls the whole retreat a gift and our species’ well-earned dethronement.
What Hernan Diaz Does With a Self
Diaz won the Pulitzer for Trust, which was four documents each quietly correcting the one before it. The gamble in Ply by Hernan Diaz is stranger and much harder to describe without spoiling the sensation. The book is cut in half. For the opening half we are sealed inside this woman’s head, close enough to hear her doubting herself. At the break, without warning or explanation, we are put outside her. She stops being the person telling us things and becomes a figure being watched, referred to only by her trade. Then, toward the end, we are let back in, except that the voice will no longer hold still. Over a single conversation it moves between three people, and only the substance of a sentence tells you who is thinking it.
It reads as a trick until you notice it is the whole point. The physicist spends the middle of the novel insisting that nobody is a substance; we are all an event, a particular arrangement of matter behaving under fixed laws, and if that is true then the line between a person and everything else is a convenience rather than a fact. So Ply by Hernan Diaz stops observing the line. Not every reader will go with her, and the closing pages ask for genuine patience.
Where Ply by Hernan Diaz gives ground:
- The physics is explained at length, repeatedly, and mostly undramatised. The same comparison of scales arrives three separate times.
- The first half moves very slowly. Five superb portraits of five mentors, and almost no forward motion until the halfway mark.
- The two crime bosses and the distant investor are thin. One gives a speech about where gold comes from; another exists mainly to arrive and announce the theme.
- The warmest relationship in the novel concludes offstage, summarised by the wrong person.
For the Group
Ply by Hernan Diaz gives a group a great deal to fight over. Start with the mentor’s accusation, because it has teeth: does theft strengthen the thing it steals from? Our narrator never answers it and never quite escapes it. Then ask what the physicist actually wants, and whether curiosity at this pitch is a virtue or an appetite, given who is in the room when she refuses to shut her machine down. Half an hour lives in whether she is a visionary or unwell, and in the novel’s refusal to decide.
The harder conversation is about betrayal, which is the book’s real structure. Our narrator abandons the man who saved her, comes within an inch of abandoning the man who protects her, and manipulates a frail old woman into humiliating herself for a vial of powder. Ask whether the novel forgives her, and whether it should. Then ask what it means that she is finally betrayed in turn, by someone with far less choice than she ever had.
Content notes: radiation sickness in detail, a finger broken on the page, torture referenced, a child beaten as part of a deception, deaths by suffocation, sepsis, cancer and overdose, addiction, and brief explicit sex.
Pair Ply by Hernan Diaz with Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel or The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, both narrated from inside a ruined order by people who will not explain it to you. Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer suits anyone who wants science that declines to resolve, and Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang takes the question of where one consciousness ends somewhere very different. Our dystopian fiction roundup has the wider field, and Scythe by Neal Shusterman is the accessible way in for a mixed group.
After the Last Page
The machine in the basement is a real technology, or its ancestor is: a plasma acceleration device, riding particles on a wave to reach energies that once needed tunnels tens of kilometres wide. Diaz spent a week at CERN and it shows, which is why the lab convinces and also why we hear so much about it.
Ply by Hernan Diaz is baggy, over-explained, and reaching further than Trust ever did. It is also the best-written novel of the season, it contains a broker worth the entrance fee on his own, and its closing pages do something to the word “I” that no amount of summary can convey. Go slowly. The first half is the price.