Hernan Diaz has never drawn from the same well twice. Or so it seems to the reader, who marvels at his increasingly varied output. This includes the Western setting of In the Distance, the multilayered exploration of 1920s financials in Trust, and this most recent work, Ply, which imagines a bleak, formidable future.
Like in his prior novels, Diaz does not shy away from dense worldbuilding and grand ideas. However, while detailed character exploration made Trust truly memorable, Ply at times comes across as concept over execution, a philosophical treatise disguised as narrative. Diaz has shown his mastery of the historical time and time again, but one wonders if there’s something to be learned from established speculative fiction writers when it comes to balancing theme and storytelling.
Ply follows an unnamed teen girl who makes her scrappy living as a ‘pincher,’ one who obtains small amounts of electricity from the corporate-controlled grid. She uses said electricity to barter for goods, satisfy brokers, and power concerts pro bono to see art flourish in the world. Diaz wastes no time in depicting said world, which takes place after an obvious climate crisis and the collapse of our infrastructure and social order. Life expectancies are far lower, class divisions just as prominent, and the poor die in the streets of abscessed teeth and run-ins with tetanus. Many function on the barter system and combine natural goods with pieces of destroyed technology to create new items. Our pincher, trained as a tinker by her late mother, is no exception. Throughout this young woman’s life, she has struggled to survive, to merely keep her head above water, yet despite her obvious hardship, she remains at a distance from the reader. Much of the novel is written in first person from the pincher’s perspective; we’re given detailed insight into her past sorrows and how hard she’s worked to stay alive, yet as the novel progresses and new plot elements enter the narrative, we’re left with a fundamental question. Do we care what becomes of the pincher? What does she have left to live for?
Diaz grapples with this question by introducing the prospect of new technology and a potential saving grace for society. The pincher, so removed from society as a whole, cannot help but take an interest. Slowly, the novel takes on a moral imperative: to act as a collective even when hopes have splintered to a drastic degree. Amassing goods and finding pleasure ultimately come second to benefiting the larger whole. And while the pincher comes to understand these ideals, we as readers are somewhat unconvinced. The misfortune she has undergone is so significant that it’s hard to imagine even a gradual change in priorities. Perhaps uncomfortably, the pincher signifies a downtrodden member of our modern working class who finds it hard to create community when simply living is challenging enough. Diaz calls for said individual to aspire to more, but this is easier said than done, and the pincher’s relatively swift change in perspective does not ring true.
What does ring true is Diaz’s post-apocalyptic setting. There is no comfortable satire, no humor, the world he portrays is eerily similar to modern concepts of the future, such as bridges crumbling due to lack of investment, the Great Lakes being the only place with access to natural resources, and a steadily growing lower class with a worse quality of life than generations prior. This vision is bleak, real, and the characters offer little reprieve from it. Ultimately, readers are left with a sense of futility, since the narrative takes a back seat to the book’s oppressive setting.
The novel relies heavily on dense descriptions of the world and how it came to be, which at times read as unrealistic in the pincher’s first-person perspective. Rather than showing us a lived-in apocalypse through scene building and natural dialogue, Diaz’s protagonist speaks from a metaphorical pulpit and tells readers what needs to be told. This only worsens as a new character enters the second half of the novel and pages upon pages are spent on dry physics and examinations of scientific theory. There are exceptions to this telling, such as the pincher’s memories of her mother and how naturally questions rise and fall in this space, but these exceptions are few and far between.
Ply succeeds as a didactic exploration of ideas, but falters in its characterizations. As a whole, it reminds readers that literature is not always an escape from existence. Of course, great art often holds a mirror to our way of life, and there is merit to the novel’s portrayal of an increasingly likely future. The pain is real and palpable, particularly in how desperately Diaz wishes this future were not our only option, that a better imagining still exists, however unrealistic it may be to hope.
FICTION
Ply
By Hernan Diaz
Riverhead Books
Published September 29, 2026
