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

There 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 viewpoint

There 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”. Continue reading...