It is a strangely comforting truth that the end of the world, at least as storytellers imagine it, is always the beginning of another. This assumption drives most postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that aspires to imagine new ways of living—living, above all else, with other people, no matter how many or few remain. Stripped of the rudiments of society, postapocalyptic characters must relearn how to speak with, survive with, and sometimes simply act decently toward one another. The best of such stories are premised on the idea that a world is something we build together, making the ruins of what was into the collective laboratory of what might yet be.
Late in his new novel, Ply, which takes place in a derelict and depopulated New York City centuries in the future, Hernan Diaz offers a scene that captures this possibility with surprising tenderness. His protagonist, a woman known to us only as the pincher—for her aptitude at pilfering electricity from what’s left of the urban grid—takes a street urchin named Ines to a shop downtown filled with “hundreds of eyeglasses mounted on a large semisphere.” They are accompanied by Pola, an older scientist from the Great Lakes region, where advanced technological civilization still exists, presumably sustained by the area’s natural watershed. The shop’s clerk, “a boy of uncertain age,” quickly determines why Ines struggles to read and jury-rigs together a pair of lenses for her, but not before tending to Pola’s failing vision too.
“They both look fabulous and can’t stop laughing. Giddy, they are, as if they’ve finally found their long-lost faces,” Diaz writes of the two women as they leave the shop. He never explains how this fanciful boutique still exists in a hardscrabble city where charged batteries “have become a form of currency.” For this brief passage, at least, he doesn’t have to. The glasses store, which seems not even to accept payment, is a simple reminder that utopia is possible. We can, Diaz suggests for a few pages, actually care for one another, even if we mostly choose cruelty instead.
This is a lovely moment, but it is also disappointingly out of sync with the book that surrounds it. We meet the pincher, an orphan, after the death of her closest friend. She’s a young woman in a city that lets few survive into old age, a minor criminal living in a paranoid haze. She is also some sort of punk genius, having cobbled together a battery capable of holding many times more charge than the “bricks” her fellow thieves use. But her truest passion is music, and she revels in every opportunity to provide juice to the eccentric bands that fill Old Manhattan’s ruins with anarchic noise. Her technical prowess draws the attention of Pola, a quantum physicist trying to rewrite the laws of reality. Soon the two are collaborating on a plan to heist all of the city’s electricity at once so that they can boot up a massive machine they are assembling with the help of the mousy Ines.
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. The first half of Ply is written in the first-person past tense from the pincher’s perspective. In the second, Diaz shifts into the third-person present, and toward the end, he moves into a plural register—although not always—for reasons that are difficult to explain without spoiling the frustratingly fuzzy ending.
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In Trust, the gradually unspooling story plays out like one of those snide riddles that concludes, “Hah! You never thought the doctor could be a woman, did you?” Here, by contrast, Diaz evidently aspires to say something more ambitious about the ways we embolden and shape other people. Treating Diaz’s intentions generously, the section narrated by the pincher might be seen as depicting her traumatized alienation, while the third-person-present section reflects her experience of opening back up to collaboration and care, and the shift into the plural suggests the transcendence of self. In this sense, Ply shares the communitarian ambitions of so much postapocalyptic fiction. Even the book’s title seems to speak to those aspirations: The pincher, Pola, and Ines meld into each other like layers of paper, somehow at once stronger and softer for the ways they conjoin.
Most of the rest of the story, however, is as thin and fragile as onionskin. Significant sections are given over to tedious monologues by tertiary characters. “We’re witnessing the end of the Renaissance,” Acevedo, one of the pincher’s mentors, lectures her in a flashback. “About a thousand years ago, the idea of God was replaced by the idea of the human.” This stream of pseudo-history goes on for several pages, as if Diaz were transcribing a Foucault essay from memory, until Acevedo reaches his conclusion: “We are free and could be even freer. And yet we are lost. Lost and rudderless. Is this dwindling, this petering out, the best we can do with ourselves?”
There is much more of this kind of thing. Almost no one in the book talks like a real person. “Everything is a clue waiting to be read,” one of the pincher’s allies pronounces. “The world is saturated with inscriptions and symbols, none of them literal.” Elsewhere, Diaz’s characters eschew theorizing for proclamations that read like rewarmed Wikipedia entries, as in one scene that finds a crime lord tediously calculating the exact amount of gold that has been mined in human history. How he has acquired this trivia when almost everyone around him is struggling just to get their hands on gold goes unsaid.
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. The theatricality of the book’s monologues crashes up against its generally realist tone, turning its exquisitely rendered setting into a sort of reverse Potemkin village: a real place full of cardboard people. In a comic novel—say, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, in which college-football players speak to one another in arcane aphorisms—the incongruity might be the beginning of a joke. In a truly searching philosophical novel, such pedantries might give way to response and resistance—tested either by circumstances or by countervailing claims. But Diaz’s characters simply carry on like self-assured seminar-room bullies, convinced they have the answers and loath to let anyone else speak up.
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Most frustrating is the lack of real conversation. Ply’s relentlessly monologic quality cuts against that primary goal of postapocalyptic fiction, a goal Diaz sometimes seems to share—to explore how people might come together again in an unstable, depopulated world. This is a shame because glimmers of genuine curiosity peek out from all of the speechifying, especially when Diaz digs beneath the pincher’s paranoia. But in place of exploring real connection, he settles into something more like metaphysical trickery, bringing his fitfully explosive story to a whispered conclusion that makes even his best-rendered characters feel less like humans than props.
In a testament to Ply’s awkward fusion of obviousness and obscurantism, by the end I found myself wondering if even Ines’s name was really just a reference to I-ness, that ego-centered state we must all transcend if we hope to live with other people. If so, Diaz still provides us with no sense of what the growing entanglement of his characters might mean for the world he has created, let alone for the characters themselves. His ending, when it arrives, promises no new beginning.