Hernan Diaz Fights Back on the D-Word as 'Ply' Arrives

Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz publishes his first novel in four years this week, and he opens the conversation by refusing a label. "I take issue with the word dystopia," Diaz says of Ply, his third novel. "I don't think Ply is a dystopian novel."

He doesn't stop there. "I think the word post-apocalyptic is absurd and oxymoronic," he continues. "If there's an apocalypse, there isn't a 'post.' It's an eschatological word. It's the end!"

Ply takes place in an urban future—probably New York City—reclaimed by nature. The state has no capacity, crime is low, and punk shows, "more like post-punk," Diaz specifies, dominate cultural life. The protagonist is a nameless young "pincher" who steals electricity from the spotty grid and delivers it to clients in battery form. Her customers include raucous musical groups and criminal elements. After she achieves a breakthrough in battery storage technology, she lands in a power struggle—pun intended—between local kingpins.

Diaz insists the world of Ply is not a collapse but a new way of life. "People in this world have lost a lot of things that are very painful to lose," he says. "The social safety net provided by the state. Rule of law. Healthcare. Education. Things that we take for granted, almost like air or water. We believe these things are natural, but they're not. They're constructs."

But other things vanish too, "things that were absolutely worth losing": oppressive power structures, environmental suppression and, top of mind these days, "the commodification of everyday life."

Ply is plot-centric, yet Diaz pairs his narrative arc with a steady dose of pontification—"There was freedom in dissolution, joy in disorder," "Paranoia is not unlike religion." Like his debut In the Distance, the new book can feel like social theory masquerading as old-school adventure. Diaz says this is by design.

"The modern novel since the 17th century has been the home of ideas and how to present them in a narrative, formally appealing way," he says. "I would dare say that is the partial definition of the novel, and what distinguishes it from other written art forms. All these novels that we think of as adventure novels, like The Count of Monte Cristo, or [H.G.] Wells, they're constitutional of the novel as a form. I don't know at what point a literary umpire decreed that this was anathema, that if you can take something out without affecting the structure, you ought to take it out."

His verdict: "I feel that adventure gets a bad rap."

Diaz grew up in Argentina and Sweden and has lived in New York since his 20s. With Ply, he completes an unintended all-American triptych: pre-U.S. (In the Distance), peak U.S. (Trust), and post-U.S. (Ply). "It wasn't deliberate to write this triumvirate of novels," he says. "I'm really guided by emotion. It just so happens that I'm interested in the American canon and American history. As I was starting Ply, I saw the arc that you described. It was like, 'Okay, I guess this is what I'm doing.'"

The research behind the book was anything but improvised. Diaz gave himself a "really demanding" scientific crash course, starting with general physics explainers before moving to primary sources. "Then I would hit the math wall super hard," he says. After three or four years, he cold emailed a project director at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), admitting his ignorance and asking for help formulating a realistic particle physics invention for the book.

"She engaged with me and invited me over," Diaz says. "I spent the week 500 feet underground. It changed my intellectual life for sure. I had meetings with all these engineers and physicists. It was fun to see what a great time they had, being free to imagine [my book's invention], talking about something completely impossible."

The invention, created by an eccentric physicist named Pola, needed to feel notionally plausible. "It's an act of generosity toward the readers," Diaz says. "I'm not just going to make up sci-fi words, like…" He pauses. "Hypertronic decongestant."

A 2024 writing residency at Columbia University's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute fed the book's other intellectual engine: consciousness. "For all the physics, for all the post-punk music, I think that this book is about selfhood," Diaz says. "It's about subjectivity. What is between us? Very literally, in a profoundly physical sense. This is the question at the core of the book."

Nostalgia preoccupies him politically as well. "Politically, I'm very suspicious of nostalgia," Diaz says. "I think it's inevitably reactionary." The characters in Ply resist returning to the vanished order of the functioning state. "Struggling to go back in time wasn't just reactionary; it was insane," the pincher thinks.

The emotional core, though, is the relationship between Pola—among the city's oldest inhabitants—and the young pincher. Diaz found a forgotten note in his files about Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, which features a grandmother and grandchild: "A punk Summer Book in the future." "I actually made myself laugh, which never happens," he says.

With the publicity whirlwind beginning, Diaz appears remarkably good-humored—ask him about the Planck constant, just not the D-word.