Hernan Diaz’s Grand Experiment
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno set about making the case for the counterintuitive claim that all motion is an illusion. Imagine a footrace, he said, between a tortoise and Achilles. As everyone knows, tortoises are gelatinously slow, whereas Achilles, at least per Homer, is famously fleet. So let’s grant the tortoise a head start, Zeno declared—say, a hundred yards. Off it lumbers. When it reaches the hundred-yard mark, Achilles starts running and rapidly reaches it, too. By then, however, the tortoise is ten yards farther along, so Achilles must close the new gap. Zeno’s point was that this process will never end: to pass the tortoise, Achilles must first get to where it was, but the tortoise will always have moved on, however incrementally—by one yard or 0.1 yard or 0.01 yard, and so on in an infinite sequence. Since you can’t complete an infinite number of steps in a finite amount of time, Zeno concluded, Achilles can never catch up, even though common sense suggests that he swiftly will.
This famous paradox appears twice in “Ply” (Riverhead), a new novel by the acclaimed Argentinean American writer Hernan Diaz. In a startling departure from his previous two books, which were set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Ply” takes place hundreds of years hence, in a version of New York City rendered almost unrecognizable by the collapse of the United States and the demise of modern democracy. We first hear about Zeno’s paradox when the book’s unnamed protagonist is a child, traumatized by the murder of her father for his alleged role in an incipient political uprising. When her mother tells her the story of Achilles and the tortoise, the girl experiences it less as philosophy than as lullaby—her mother’s way of saying that, although they live in a world without legal or political protections, “no one, no matter how hard they tried, would ever be able to reach us. We would always be a step ahead.”
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Years later, when the protagonist is grown, she encounters a scientist named Pola, who pauses while explaining some complex theoretical physics to ask, “I don’t suppose you are familiar with the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise?” Pola recounts that paradox the way the philosopher originally conceived it—as a puzzle about the nature of reality. Although Zeno was wrong about the mathematics of infinity, his hypothetical footrace still captures a fundamental question about the universe: Can space-time, that four-dimensional weft in which all of existence unfolds, be endlessly subdivided? Or is it made up of some ultimate, indivisible particle, like an atom as the ancients imagined it, only unimaginably smaller?
Scientists don’t know the answer, for an intriguing reason: once you divide space-time into small enough units, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity start contradicting each other, and our understanding of the universe falls apart. In Diaz’s novel, Pola is aware of this, but she believes both that a fundamental particle exists and that she is on the verge of discovering and controlling it, thereby acquiring world-altering powers. Here she is, standing beside a D.I.Y. particle accelerator that she has rigged up in the basement of an abandoned uptown art museum, waxing abstrusely grandiose about her plans:
Good luck to her. It’s hard enough to be in control of the very knots in the threads that weave the fabric of a novel, and you might as well know up front that this one unravels. On the plus side, unravelling is what “Ply” is about: what is lost, what is gained, and what possibilities emerge when all of our usual laws, societal as well as physical, break down.
Lawlessness is familiar terrain for Diaz. His first novel, the magnificent “In the Distance,” follows one Håkan Söderström, the younger of two brothers growing up in rural Sweden around the eighteen-forties. Diaz sets the plot in motion in three efficient pages: when Håkan’s father earns some unexpected money, he buys his sons passage to New York. Their transatlantic journey is slated to begin in Portsmouth, but once there Håkan loses sight of his brother in the crowds along the wharf. Alone and increasingly desperate, the boy goes from pier to pier, asking for a boat that is headed to “Nujårk,” a word no one around him understands. Then he tries “Amerika” and is waved onto a ship that sets sail for its destination: San Francisco.
The rest of “In the Distance” is an inverted and eviscerated Western. Hoping to make his way back to his brother, Håkan disembarks in California and immediately heads East, against the flow of all the homesteaders and forty-niners streaming West. As he travels through the United States, he occasionally encounters kindness or wisdom, but he never encounters anything like the rule of law; preëmptive or retaliatory violence is the chief recourse of everyone from prospectors and pioneers to Mormon vigilantes, and the sole sheriff to appear in two thousand miles of wilderness is vicious and corrupt. Eventually, Håkan is forced to participate in this omnipresent bloodshed, at a terrible cost to his soul and his reputation. Soon, he is turned into a myth, wanted across the West for crimes he didn’t commit. Now known as the Hawk, a mangling of both the name and the nature of this singularly unpredatory man, he goes into hiding, the dream of New York receding as he is consigned, like an American Moses, to endlessly traversing the desert without entering the promised land.
When Diaz wrote “In the Distance,” he had no agent; he submitted the manuscript in response to a call for new work by Coffee House Press, a nonprofit publisher in Minneapolis. The book came out in 2017; six months later, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Diaz won the prize for his second novel, “Trust,” which recounts, in four ways, the story of an astronomically wealthy Roaring Twenties-era financier and his enigmatic wife. The first version is a compact novel-within-a-novel in which this fictional couple is further fictionalized, to an uncertain degree but scandalous effect. The second is the financier’s incomplete autobiography, which he intends as a riposte to the novel but which reads as the kind of boastful yet vacuous legacy burnishing beloved of powerful men in their waning years. The third is a memoir by a woman—part secretary, part ghostwriter—whom the financier hired to help him with the autobiography, while the fourth is a fragment of the final journal of his wife, the largely invisible force who sets the whole story spinning.
If “In the Distance” is about the lawlessness of a region that has not yet cohered into a nation, “Trust” is about a lawlessness more familiar to us today: the exploitable anarchy of the financial markets—in this case during the early twentieth century, when checks on financiers were minimal to nonexistent. Diaz’s main character sees the crash of 1929 coming and shorts the entire stock market, so that, when the economy collapses, his private fortune soars. It is unclear whether he is lucky, brilliant, or abetted by a keener mind, just as it is unclear whether he is amoral or immoral, or whether he believes his own self-justifying pablum. (“Profit and common good are but two sides of the same coin.”) As that pervasive uncertainty suggests, “Trust” is also about a kind of literary lawlessness—about whether this novel and its several narrators can be relied on to follow the rules of storytelling.
Despite this thematic overlap, you could read “In the Distance” and “Trust” back-to-back and never guess that they shared an author. Diaz’s first book is simultaneously mythic and intimate; it stays close on Håkan and the vast landscape that he moves through—seldom has the American West been written about more gorgeously—and you are always inside the story, right at its tragic hero’s heels. By contrast, “Trust” is cool and distant; you don’t enter it so much as peer into it, as into a skeleton clock, watching the turning of its gears.
“Ply” continues this trend: although it, too, is concerned with the breakdown of laws, it reads nothing like its predecessors. This is partly because its future setting makes it feel like science fiction, even though the world it depicts has backslid from the scientific standards of today. In fact, it has backslid from every standard of today: in a sort of ultimate triumph of Project 2025, centralized government is a thing of the past, which means there are no public services in this future New York—no public health, no public education, no public utilities.
One consequence is that life expectancy has plunged. Without affordable medical care or social welfare, people die of tooth decay and childbirth and exposure to the cold come winter. Fertility has also collapsed for reasons no one understands—maybe an unknown disease, maybe environmental toxins, maybe a genetic mutation. The demographic impact is drastic: late thirties is the new old age, reaching fifty is almost unheard of, and the over-all population has plummeted.
As a result, much of “Ply” has a distinct “World Without Us” feel. In Diaz’s version of New York, dolphins arc through the East River, black bears browse on acorns from SoHo’s abundant oak trees, and whole avenues’ worth of buildings, their tops caved in, have turned into “massive planters.” Even island biogeography is having its way; the moose that dwell in the Bronx are unusually small, the feral cats of Manhattan strangely large. The human residents of this de-urbanizing city live a hybrid life, part modern, part ancient. They watch things called projections and possess iPhone-like devices called stells, but they get around mainly on foot and by bike, barter goods and services, gather to gossip at water stations, and settle down after sunset into an almost primordial darkness.
That’s because electricity, like every other commodity in this new New York, is privatized, under the control of a company called Tensor. Since few people can afford power bills, almost everyone relies on the thriving black market for “bricks,” portable batteries whose charge is illicitly siphoned from the grid. The people who do that siphoning are known as “pinchers,” and our unnamed protagonist is one of them. That puts her in the crosshairs of CTS, a private security company that has taken over another former function of the state: public safety. The difference is that, like early insurance companies, CTS extinguishes only the fires it is paid, including by Tensor, to put out.
It was CTS that murdered the pincher’s father, in an Argentinean-style disappearance of anyone who agitated against this privatization: no trials, no Gulags, just gone. When her mother dies some years later, the protagonist, then age eleven, is left adrift. Eventually, she makes her way to a man named Acevedo, a prominent tinker in a city that is full of them because “nothing new is ever really available and nothing old is ever really thrown away.” Acevedo’s workshop looks like a junk yard and functions like a food pantry, but, in a familiar trope of science fiction, it operates like a religious order, with shaved-headed apprentices expected to be silent, selfless, and entirely without need.
Acevedo himself functions as both the book’s moral authority and its political theorist. In a lecture to his apprentices, he explains what brought about the long-ago collapse of liberal democracy: basically, an unchecked continuation of everything filling the op-ed pages today. Social mobility gave way to impermeable class divisions; the idea of inalienable rights withered on the vine; a profound skepticism of government replaced an understanding that some problems are too large or challenging or unremunerative for any other entity to solve; and artificial intelligence undermined the belief that humans are unique and extraordinary—the very conviction that had undergirded all those other ideals since the Renaissance.
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. It doesn’t really mourn the lost world order; at one point, Acevedo lists the superior qualities of his own times, from the decline of the patriarchy to the end of the carceral state. Only reluctantly does he acknowledge all the misery around him, which both he and the pincher choose to regard as a sign that they are living through the painful birth of a better era. Elsewhere, however, the book suggests that the present lawlessness is itself that better outcome. “There was freedom in dissolution, joy in disorder,” Diaz writes, as if advocating for anarchy, though most of his characters appear to subscribe only to the political philosophy known as making the best of a bad situation.
If the book has one consistent political sentiment, it is a kind of Occupy Wall Street-style anti-capitalism. In “Ply,” as in Zuccotti Park circa 2011, people with different and sometimes incompatible views have exactly one thing in common: anger over the untrammelled greed of the private sector, its steady hijacking of public services, and its ruinous impact on everyday citizens. A similar sentiment lay at the heart of “Trust,” where its fictional treatment was clear and spare, but in “Ply” it is both more emphatic and more confusing. Somehow, we are to believe that New York is no longer a monument to commerce and consumption, yet also that it is controlled, down to matters of life and death, by private corporations.
To further muddy these waters, our protagonist abandons Acevedo, the strongest critic of capitalism in the book, when she falls in love with a fellow-apprentice named Sol, who craves a different life. “I want to be free to want,” she declares, and the two run off together to begin their careers as pinchers. Acevedo regards pinching as pure theft, and thus “the ultimate affirmation of private property.” But Sol thinks of it as “profit . . . and fun,” and, for a while, she’s right, especially because the two women settle into a particularly glamorous niche of the business—powering concerts for the city’s thriving music scene.
Music is a constant presence in “Ply,” as it was in “Trust”: proof that the arts can flourish even in a culture seemingly too preoccupied with other things—wealth accumulation, survival—to care about them. Diaz, who is gifted at describing sound, packs “Ply” with bands both new and retro, some of which arguably represent a different sort of anti-capitalist impulse, although only in that vague way best summarized as Fuck the Man. But, the more time we spend with them, the more the book’s inchoate political energy dissipates. Moreover, the pincher herself gets something else from the music scene. A literal purveyor of power, she finally feels like a figurative one, too, and the sensation is exhilarating. “It was short-lived,” she tells us, “but while it lasted it was a long, pure now.”
What shatters this high is the slightest of accidents: Sol cuts her hand on a nail. Two days later, she is dead of sepsis, and our heartbroken protagonist takes a hard turn toward suspicion and solitude. Functioning now mostly as a lone wolf, she spends her time tinkering with a new model of brick she’s designed, twice the size of the typical version but capable of holding forty times the charge. When others grow interested in it, she senses danger and decides to stop pinching. But then along comes Pola, the scientist, who is ready to begin her world-altering experiment, except for one hitch: she needs electricity.
A curious thing happens at the start of the second half of “Ply.” The narration switches, not from one character to another but from the first person to the third. Having spent two hundred pages following along inside an “I,” we are suddenly kicked out and find ourselves reading about “the pincher.” That shift coincides with two others. First, Diaz turns his attention from the nature of society to the nature of the self and the universe. Second, we swap mentor figures, with Acevedo the tinker replaced by Pola the scientist—an austere and ethical fixer of real objects for the benefit of the people replaced by a volatile, drug-addicted, possibly crazy theoretical physicist. (Diaz has a fondness for maybe-mad scientists; “In the Distance” has one, too, who is more consistently kind than Pola but similarly single-minded.)
At the beginning of this second half, the pincher agrees to help Pola acquire the electricity she needs. This turns out to be all of it: the two plan to drain Tensor’s main power grid and store its energy for use in Pola’s experiment. To do so, they develop a heist-y plan, promising to hand over prototypes of the pincher’s new brick to a couple of interested parties in exchange for staging a riot that will distract CTS when Tensor most needs it. First, though, they must build a battery capable of storing the power they intend to steal. As they work on it, the women grow close, despite Pola’s sometimes difficult personality and despite the outrageousness of her experiment. This involves not only the particle accelerator but a mysterious golden disk that Pola believes can manipulate space-time and therefore reshape the universe.
You either do or don’t have a taste for this sort of thing. The pincher, for one, does not, but she falls under Pola’s spell anyway, coming to see her as a mother figure. Soon, the pincher also acquires a surrogate daughter—a young orphan named Ines, whom she takes in after finding her badly beaten outside their museum turned laboratory. Ines takes a shine to both women, and the time the trio spends together, like the time the pincher and Sol shared in the first half of the book, forms a temporary idyll.
Eventually, though, the moment arrives to implement their plan—which, like many such plans, works until it doesn’t. The heist appears to go off without a hitch, but the experiment does not: when a fire engulfs the lab, the pincher rushes to put it out and, in the process, stumbles into the golden disk. She survives but suffers serious burns, and before long starts showing signs of radiation sickness. Yet she is more consumed by what she saw when she looked into the disk—a vision, as difficult to re-create as dreams by day, of merging with space-time.
Soon, the pincher floats free of her consciousness, briefly inhabiting the mind of Pola or Ines before flickering back into herself. Accordingly, the narration starts flickering as well, between “the pincher” and the “I” of firsthand experience. Meanwhile, the other characters grow unstable, too, seeming to become alternate versions of the pincher or her mother. The pincher attributes this loosening of the boundaries of the self to her contact with the disk; the reader wonders if it’s just part of the process of dying. In the end—I’m not spoiling anything; I am doubtful, for many reasons, that the concept applies to this book—there is a great betrayal, and a great explosion, and a great many unanswered questions.
Partway through “Ply,” a minor character named Anton launches into an irritated monologue about the saying “I am here for you.” As a non-native English speaker, he finds these words meaningless, and he has a point. “I,” “here,” and “you” are all examples of indexical words, those whose meaning changes depending on their context.
Much of the second part of “Ply” is a meditation on those words, too. I, here, you—we change in relation to one another and to where we are, including, Diaz suggests, on a map of coördinates we cannot even fathom. His book is interested in not only whether the universe is composed of some fundamental particle but whether we are: whether there is an irreducible essence of selfhood or whether that is just an illusion, as Zeno claimed motion was—a local experience of reality that occludes another one, so hidden or vast or mysterious that it falls almost entirely outside our comprehension.
You can’t fault Diaz for lack of ambition. As a title, “Ply” is a slippery, clever choice, a word that means “layer” while containing other layers of meaning. So, too, the book itself, which is preoccupied with many things at once: what people are made of, what society is made of, what the universe is made of. And the whole of Diaz’s career is similarly ambitious. As different as his three books are, together they form a kind of new “U.S.A.” trilogy—or, more aptly, an “N.Y.C.” trilogy. “In the Distance” features a New York that is both a longed-for destination and an imagined locus of civilization; in “Trust,” it has become the heart of an all-devouring financial industry and its ethos of pure greed; in “Ply,” that ethos has been fulfilled, turning the city into a site of radical decay and, potentially, the birth of something new.
Regrettably, the grand intellectual ambitions of “Ply” finally overwhelm the other desiderata of fiction. One of these is storytelling. Diaz excels at this, as his previous books attest—“In the Distance” is genuinely impossible to put down—but the narrative energy of “Ply” keeps getting derailed, not least because two of its main characters exist mostly to lecture us. This sort of works with Acevedo, the proxy political theorist, but doesn’t work at all with Pola, the proxy cosmologist, whose ten-page discourse on space-time fails not only to clarify the relevant particle physics (admittedly a tall order) but also to provoke our awe or pique our curiosity about her character.
That last problem is not limited to Pola. Although some bit players in this book are wonderfully drawn—especially Anton, a bombastic but bighearted black-market kingpin—the pincher herself seems as if she exists only to do the author’s bidding. Learning about her is more like reading a personnel file than meeting a person, which proves fatal for the novel’s stakes. I understood what Diaz was doing with all those chameleon pronouns near the end, but it is difficult to care about the dissolution of a character who never quite felt real in the first place.
Still, there is something in Diaz that wants to be reckoned with, something that brings to mind those black bears in SoHo, startling and powerful and rare. At one point, the pincher comes across an old Hawthorne story and is struck by how effectively it does what Pola can only dream of doing centuries later: set someone loose on multiple chronologies simultaneously. The reference is heavy-handed, but the idea is the right one. With due respect to the innovations of science, fiction remains the most powerful microscope, telescope, seismograph, X-ray machine, and particle accelerator we’ve ever discovered—a way to examine the world at every scale, to reverse causality, to alter time, to identify fundamental properties, to reveal our inner workings and control the conditions of the universe. Best of all, and happily for Diaz, you can run as many experiments as you want, and no one is harmed when the odd one fails. ♦