Hernan Diaz publishes his fourth novel, "Ply," today, marking his first book since "Trust," the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner that turned a fractured story of Gilded Age finance into a meditation on who gets to write history. His new book, out from Riverhead Books, trades Wall Street for a stateless future and swaps hard currency for stolen electricity.
Set centuries from now in a crumbling, postliterate city that evokes New York after the collapse of the federal government, "Ply" follows an unnamed orphan raised to work as a "pincher" — someone who illegally taps the power grid to charge "bricks," batteries that double as currency in the black market. The 464-page novel splits roughly in two: its first half alternates between the pincher's precarious present, in which her trade pulls her into an underground art and music scene, and her backstory as an orphan; its second half shifts from first-person to third-person narration and narrows into a stranger, more speculative plot involving a scientific invention that could upend the nature of reality itself.
A Deliberate Swerve From "Trust"
Where "Trust" used the layered, unreliable accounts of a fictional financier to interrogate the writing of history, "Ply" takes the same interest in who controls a narrative and relocates it to speculative fiction, a genre Diaz has not worked in before. Early reviews have generally credited the ambition of the pivot while noting it asks more patience of readers than his previous novel did.
"A brainy, challenging, and engrossing trek into a battered but unbeaten future."
Kirkus Reviews
The Boston Globe similarly praised the book's construction, writing that Diaz is "juggling an ambitious plot and thorny philosophical questions, yet the novel remains compulsively readable, carried along by intricate worldbuilding." Not every review has been as warm: some critics have argued the novel tries to tell too many stories simultaneously and doesn't fully commit to any single one, a structural risk built into Diaz's decision to split the book's voice and genre partway through.
Diaz, an Argentine-American novelist who also serves as associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University, built the novel around a question that recurs across both of its halves: how deeply a society must get inside the heads of the people around it before it can be rebuilt more justly. "Ply" arrives as publishers continue to bet on literary fiction with speculative or dystopian settings, a category that has grown steadily since the pandemic. The book is available now at booksellers nationwide, with Diaz scheduled to appear at independent bookstores in the coming weeks to promote the release.
