A vision of the future both deeply disconcerting and oddly exhilarating ... Not a simple condemnation of technological advancement, an exercise in Luddite nostalgia, or a screed about the perils of innovation ... After the uncanny and vibrantly imagined world of Ply, after the fresh and vital voice of the pincher, the novel’s second half felt disappointing and the playing with pronouns and tenses a bit gimmicky.
Yet pleasures still appear ... A testament to the surpassing importance of the human voice, artistic fecundity, improvisation, and ingenuity.
Readers who became fans of Hernan Diaz for his novel Trust, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, may be disoriented by Ply, his latest. Where Trust was a sharply controlled exploration of capitalism set in the past, Ply is practically the opposite — a sprawling far-future narrative of a life lived on the margins ... For a book set so far in the future, it still manages to be a paean to a familiar phase of youth, culture, metropolitan living ... With the transportive power of music, found families and trade-based economy, Ply resonates with the founding ideas of Burning Man. What if, despite everything, you could create a community that is wild and anarchic and free?
Many books about the future are ways of thinking through the problems of the present. One of the difficulties with Ply is that it seems to want to do this but never quite settles on what to say ... Both more emphatic and more confusing ... he more time we spend with them, the more The book’s inchoate political energy dissipates ... You can’t fault Diaz for lack of ambition. As a title, Ply is a slippery, clever choice ... Regrettably, the grand intellectual ambitions of Ply finally overwhelm the other desiderata of fiction ... The narrative energy of Ply keeps getting derailed, not least because two of its main characters exist mostly to lecture us.
Diaz’s characters lack interiority. They’re action figures, posed into series of cinematic stances ... As humorless as a James Blunt song ... Little interest is taken in the messy, earthy life that humans make do with. Diaz doesn’t do close-up work ... Ply wears its politics, gender and otherwise, very heavily ... As clunky and didactic, in a progressive-anarchist direction, as anything in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. For readers of nearly any politics, it’s suffocating, as if someone has thrown a tarp over your head.
Fails to fulfill the promise of every great end-of-the-world novel ... Readers of Diaz’s previous novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Trust, a nested quartet of manuscripts exposing early-20th-century robber barony, will likely come to this one expecting similar narrative shenanigans. Diaz, unfortunately, delivers ... Significant sections are given over to tedious monologues by tertiary characters ... Almost no one in the book talks like a real person ... Some readers may find a bit to chew on in Diaz’s ideas, which draw on a rich tradition of 20-century theory. I didn’t, mostly because he presents his lecturers’ thoughts as if they were ends in themselves rather than opportunities for further characterization.
Ply is no disappointment ... Diaz is special. While his prose might lack verbal pyrotechnics, it is doggedly efficient, with no shortage of incisive power. And his novels all mix compelling narratives and interesting characters with metafictional dexterity ... This vision of a fragmented and fallen future is not uncommon in science fiction, of course, but Diaz presents the conditions in vivid and unusually believable detail, and his vision of a slow apocalypse of capitalist decay does not seem at all far-fetched.
Ply...has some tricks up its sleeve, but its best idea — the one implied by its title and the abrupt shift in perspective — arrives late. This idea is so big and offers so many narrative possibilities that you might end up lamenting all that time spent running round the city with the pincher and her pals during the first half of the book ... There are also shades of young adult fiction in those early scenes that may dissatisfy readers drawn in by Diaz’s Pulitzer credentials ... It’s possible that by unmooring himself from history, Diaz has given himself a little too much freedom ... Ply seems intent on telling multiple stories at once and can’t fully commit to any of them.
Diaz does not shy away from dense worldbuilding and grand ideas ... 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 succeeds as a didactic exploration of ideas, but falters in its characterizations.
Diaz renders the world as remarkably recognizable: the narrator’s parents opened a used bookstore in an abandoned bar, militant 'volunteers' cling to an idea of law and order that threatens individual freedom, and the city is split between downtown’s scrappier streets and the wealthier residents of Uptown. Another noteworthy work from the celebrated Argentine American novelist.
Touching ... A big, ambitious novel. Some elements will appeal to avid science fiction readers and others to those who prefer fiction that illuminates character and human interaction. It's a radical departure in subject matter and style from Trust but unquestionably the product of a fertile imaginative intelligence.
Diaz brilliantly envisions how love, trust, and loyalty can remain when freedom and justice have collapsed and makes every page exhilarating and meaningful.
Visionary if plot-heavy ... This feels like an experiment in eschatology where, ironically, the end never seems to come. Still, there’s much to admire in Diaz’s ambition.
