Ply by Hernan Diaz review – Pulitzer winner’s dry vision of far-future America

Challenging language … Hernan Diaz. Photograph: TT News Agency/AlamyView image in fullscreenChallenging language … Hernan Diaz. Photograph: TT News Agency/AlamyReviewPly by Hernan Diaz review – Pulitzer winner’s dry vision of far-future AmericaThere are shades of JG Ballard in this tale of survival in a decaying metropolis, but big ideas and lengthy exposition crowd out the human drama

Hernan Diaz’s last novel, the formally inventive Trust, narrated the biography of a successful financier from four different viewpoints to investigate themes of memory, representation, fiction and the fictitiousness of money. It was both critically and commercially successful and won the Pulitzer prize. His latest book, Ply, is a speculative epic set in a decaying city. While the time and location are never spelled out, the evidence strongly suggests a version of New York City several centuries into the future. A series of upheavals have depopulated this “shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur”.

There is more than a flavour of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World in the way the rewilded city is depicted: the lynx and deer stalking the streets, “the downtown swamp where the blind limbs and tendrils of trees and climbers have been at work for ages pulling the last line of collapsing buildings down into the spongy soil under the water”. Somewhere beyond the city, a more technologically sophisticated life endures. The evidence for this are the monopolistic companies Flow and Tensor, which control water and electricity respectively; and CTS, an unexplained acronym for a private security company that protects their interests and “holds a monopoly over monitoring and patrolling of the streets”.

At street level, the city’s resourceful inhabitants live on their wits, bartering recycled goods, trading stimulants, food and other products. The novel’s narrator-protagonist is a pincher, someone who steals electricity from the grid. Like the city, she is never given a name. This is a strange bit of reticence in a novel that is generally eager to explain everything.

Raised by her parents in a second-hand bookshop – “one of the last shops of its kind in town” – the narrator loses first her father and then her mother, though not before her mother, a tinker, trains her in the art of recycling broken objects. In a world of scarcity, these skills are much in demand. Like much in the book, the details of the narrator’s apprenticeship manage to be simultaneously lengthy and vague. She lovingly recalls her mother creating “spectacularly time-consuming and comically complex contraptions”. At one point, she also repairs a blender.

Forced to fend for herself, the narrator spends time with gentle druggie Nelson, then utopian visionary Acevedo, who supervises her training as a tinker until she leaves to follow her doomed love interest Sol and find her true calling as a pincher.

Interspersed with chapters of backstory, the real action of the book follows the narrator as she makes a living supplying stolen electricity to the city’s thriving independent music scene. On one of her regular pinching expeditions, she realises she’s being followed. It turns out that her technical accomplishments have caught the eye of Pola, a lone female scientist.

Heraclitus-quoting Pola lives in the basement of what is probably the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is “convinced that we need to reconsider the meaning, reach and very nature of reason itself”. Pola, like the narrator’s mother, is an inspiring intellectual who is fascinated by machines. She is at work on something that she claims will “alter the fabric of reality itself”. There are many long explanations of how this laser plasma particle accelerator might work: “if we managed to entangle this particle with countless others in an ever-expanding arborescence, we could play with these superpositions and reorganise spacetime with total deliberation”. As far I understand it, Pola’s machine is basically another blender: one that will turn spacetime into a primordial smoothie, where there’s no distinction between subject and object, you and me, past and present.

The second half of the book becomes, broadly speaking, a heist in which the narrator tries to figure out a way to steal a massive amount of power from the grid to fire up Pola’s machine. The plot is complicated by the appearance of a young girl called Ines; the machinations of two baddies called Kenneth and Leslie; evil scientist Casey; a scenester called Harlow, who’s a nod at Andy Warhol; and Anton, a trader from Bulgaria who talks like a character in an Oscar Wilde play. There is also some variation between third- and first-person narration as Diaz teases us with the notion that, through her involvement with Pola’s machine, the narrator has broken through to a non-dual perception of reality where the boundary between self and other dissolves.

The step up to willing suspension of disbelief is a steep one in speculative and dystopian fiction. Where it works – I’m thinking of Russell Hoban, Michel Faber, Emily St John Mandel – there’s a constellation of things that seduce the reader: credible human relationships; a sense of grief at the changes that have come upon the world; curiosity; puzzlement; and a reticence that allows the reader to infer more than they’re actually told.

The challenging language of Hoban’s Riddley Walker might not be to everyone’s taste – that broken English in which he laments the loss of a world he can’t begin to understand: “O what we ben! And what we come to!” But the narrative voice of Ply is, to my mind, off-puttingly knowing and verbose.

There are a few selective gaps in the narrator’s understanding of the world – a shaky grasp of history and geography, no placenames, days of the week, or dates. Yet she can marshal a mysterious abundance of implied knowledge to describe an old salt shed: “The structure, an off-kilter polygon with planes intersecting at unexpected angles, rose like a hyper-augmented rendition of one of the billions of grains it once used to contain.”

Big ideas – quantum mechanics, political economy, non-duality – crowd out the human drama that would give the story life. Characters make long speeches and die suddenly. And there’s something simplistic and complacent in the narrator’s view that some form of human progress is being hatched by the community struggling to live in the depopulated city. These convictions are never put under pressure. We never leave the city to see what life is like elsewhere. We never get to meet the faceless bureaucrats of Tensor or Flow. 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 incentives, most of us could find plausible-sounding reasons to say that two and two make five or take a job at CTS.

The biggest problem of all is that Ply is a very dry biscuit, with lots of exposition but little in the way of narrative energy. In one of her rare moments of doubt, the narrator looks at Pola’s machine and wobbles as she sees “an abstract monument to an incomprehensible idea”. It’s an accurate summation of this novel.