Review: Hernan Diaz – Pulitzer-winning author's cold vision of America's distant future
In this survival tale set in a declining megacity, echoes of J.G. Ballard are present, but its grand ideas and drawn-out human drama undermine it. Hernan Diaz's latest novel, Trust, a formally innovative work, tells the biography of a successful financier from four different perspectives to explore themes of memory, representation, the fictionality of money, and fictional storytelling. It was a critical and commercial success and won the
The latest novel by Hernan Diaz, officially Inventor of Trust, tells the biography of a successful financier from four different perspectives to explore themes of memory, representation, fiction, and the fabrication of money. It was both a critical and commercial success and won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, Ply, is a theoretical epic set in a decaying city. While the time and place have never been determined, evidence strongly points to a version of New York City several centuries in the future. A series of developments has left this "ruined world of past greatness" uninhabited.
There is more than a taste of JJ Ballard's sunken world in the way the wild city is reimagined: lynx and deer stalking the streets, "a downtown swamp where the blind limbs and tendrils of trees and climbers have been at work for years, submerging the last line of crumbling buildings." Somewhere beyond the city, a more technologically complex life continues. Evidence of this is the monopoly companies Flow and Tensor, which control water and electricity, respectively. and CTS, an obscure acronym for a private security company that protects their interests and "has a monopoly on surveillance and street patrolling".
At street level, the city's resourceful residents live by their wits, bartering recycled goods, trading stimulants, food and other products. The narrator-protagonist of the novel One Pincher, who steals electricity from the grid. Like the city, he is never given a name. It's an odd bit of silence in a novel that's generally eager to explain everything.
Raised by his parents in a second-hand bookstore—“one of the last of its kind in town”—first he loses his father, then his mother, but not before his mother, a tinkerer, trains him in the art of recycling scraps. In a world of scarcity, these skills are in high demand. As with much in the book, the details of the narrator's internship are simultaneously long and vague. He fondly remembers his mother creating "very time-consuming and hilariously complicated revelations." At one point, he also repairs a blender.
Double quotes Ply is a very dry biscuit, with lots of explanation but little narrative energy.
Forced to fend for herself, the narrator spends time with the kindly pharmacist Nelson, then the idealistic dreamer Acevedo, who oversees her training as a tinkerer until he leaves her to pursue her doomed love, Sol, and find her true calling as a pinner.
Interspersed with chapters of backstory, the book's real-life action follows the narrator as he makes a living supplying stolen electricity to the city's thriving independent music scene. On one of his regular expeditions, he discovers that he is being followed. It turns out that her technical achievements have caught the eye of the lonely female scientist, Chashm Pola.
Quoting Heraclitus, Pola lives in the basement of what might be the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is "convinced that we must rethink the meaning, reach, and nature of reason itself." Pula, like the narrator's mother, is an inspiring intellectual who is fascinated by cars. He is working on something he claims will "change the fabric of reality". There's a long explanation of how this laser plasma particle accelerator works: "If we manage to entangle this particle with an infinite number of particles in an ever-expanding arboretum, we can play with these superpositions and reorganize spacetime with complete reflection." As far as I can tell, the Pola machine is basically another blender: a machine that turns spacetime into a primal smoothie, where there is no distinction between subject and object, you and me, past and present.
The second half of the book, in general, becomes a heist where the narrator tries to find a way to steal a lot of power from the grid to power Pola's car. The story is complicated by the appearance of a young girl named Ines. The intrigues of two bad guys named Kenneth and Leslie. Casey the Evil Scientist; A scene called Harlow, a reference to Andy Warhol. and Anton, a businessman from Bulgaria who speaks like a character in an Oscar Wilde play. There are also differences between the third- and first-person narratives, as Díaz teases us with the idea that through his encounter with Polamashin, the narrator has penetrated a non-dual perception of reality in which the boundary between self and other dissolves.
The step to enthusiastic suspension of disbelief is a steep one in speculative and dystopian fiction. Where it works—I'm thinking Russell Hoban, Michel Faber, Emily St. John Mendel—there's a set of things that seduce the reader: authentic human relationships. Feeling sad about the changes that have happened to the world. curiosity; confusion; and a silence that allows the reader to infer more than what is actually being said.
Ridley Walker Hoban's challenging language may not be to everyone's taste – that broken English in which he laments the loss of a world he cannot understand: "Oh what we were! And what we've come to!" But I find Pauly's narrative voice unacceptably knowledgable and verbose.
There are a few choice gaps in the narrator's understanding of the world—a shaky understanding of history and geography, no place names, days of the week, or dates. Still, he can glean a great deal of arcane tacit knowledge describing an ancient salt shaker: "The structure, a far-rotating polygon with planes intersecting at unexpected angles, appeared like a super-enhanced representation of one of the billions of grains it once contained."
The big ideas—quantum mechanics, political economy, non-duality—remove the human drama that gives life to the story. Characters give long speeches and die suddenly. And there is something simplistic and smug about the narrator's view that a form of human progress is shaped by a society struggling to survive in a deserted city. These beliefs are never under pressure. We never leave the city to see what life is like in other places. We can never meet the faceless bureaucrats of Tensor or Flo. The novel's antagonists are one-dimensional villains, not human beings pursuing their own idea of the good life. A writer with a more tragic view of human nature might suspect that, given the right motivations, most of us could find plausible reasons to say that two and two make five or work at CTS.
The biggest problem is that Ply is a very dry biscuit, with lots of exposition but little narrative energy. In a rare moment of doubt, the narrator looks at Pola's car and is moved to see "an abstract monument to an incomprehensible idea." This is an accurate summary of this novel.
Ply by Hernan Diaz is published by Picador (£20). To support The Guardian, order your copy. Delivery charges may apply.