Audiobook Review
Ply (2026)
by Hernan Diaz
Hernan Diaz returns after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his last novel, Trust (2022). I read Trust in the because it made the Booker prize Longlist. At the time I said, "I quite enjoyed Trust, though I'm not sure it's a (booker prize) short lister- it might be a National Book Award and/or Pulitzer Nominee- vibe-wise Trust reminds me of Richard Powers- a recent winner and author of a book- Gain, that really reminds me of Trust, in that it attempts to convey an economic narrative in a novel."
Thus, when I read the negative review in the New York Times calling Ply a dud and specifically calling out his Ballardian cyberpunk future as Dead on Arrival, I wasn't particularly dissuaded. I got a bump to the top of the Libby borrowing list and blazed through my seven-day rental window at 2.25 speed- faster than I prefer but fine for Ply, which, at 15 hours isn't shockingly long but IS at times tedious. I largely agree with the New York Times review of Dwight Garner. Ply, like Trust, again stuck me as resembling the technique of Richard Powers- introducing subject matter from science (here it is physics) and melding that with elements of both genre and literary fiction. Garner critiques the lack of specificity in Diaz's description of this dystopian future but I think that was a very specific choice by Diaz to keep from alienating his potential audience, he wanted something familiar enough to a literary fiction audience to not be off-putting.
I thought the most interesting facet of Ply, and something Garner didn't mention in his review, is the depiction of social life within the dystopian future. Diaz goes further in describing this part of his world than any other dystopian/literary fiction cross-over that I can remember. The human relationship at the center of Ply, between a girl electricity thief called "the pincher" and a kooky mad scientist who needs her help, was interesting, to me. Overall, though, yeah, hard to see an Audience responding to Ply.
An independent critical observation I want to lay out in brief is that Diaz depicts a world where living beyond 40 or 50 is unusual. This appears to be based on a fundamental misapprehension about human demography before modern medicine lowered infant mortality from almost half to essentially zero. This often takes the form of depicting these times as being almost devoid of old people and having characters muse on how few people live beyond their mid 30's or 40's. That is not how shit worked. The fact is that if someone lived beyond year 5, they had a reasonable chance of living to a "normal" old age- 60 or 70, and that there were plenty of old people around back in the day.
Not an issue that would bother me normally, but Diaz does include pages and pages of his mad scientist character discussing particle physics, and his mad scientist character is the only human over 50 in the book, and Diaz' Pincher constantly talks about how, as a 20 something, she only has a few more years left before she can expect to die.
Instagram