Pulitzer prize winner Hernán Díaz’ new book ‘Ply’ follows a young woman who siphons electricity to power punk shows in a re-wilded world. Díaz tells NPR how the novel came to examine selfhood, identity and intimacy.
Transcript
ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
Hernan Diaz’s latest novel, “Ply,” has themes of power and greed, much like his 2022 novel “Trust,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I spoke with Hernan Diaz here in the studio and asked him to start by telling us about the book’s main protagonist.
HERNAN DIAZ: The protagonist is a young woman who lives in this city sometime in the future, vaguely shaped after New York. She’s very crafty. She’s very intuitive as a sort of proto-engineer. People get by fiddling and tinkering with objects and technology, and she’s very adept at it. Gradually, she becomes a pincher, who’s someone who siphons electricity for the grid. This is a novel about power in at least two different senses – the crisis of political power, of course, the institution of the state is largely gone – well, completely gone – but also electric power and physical forces in a very literal way. She supplies power to these very weird avant-garde punkish bands.
NADWORNY: With the best names, I must say.
DIAZ: Oh, thank you. I have a big document…
NADWORNY: Yes.
DIAZ: …With names that didn’t make the cut. Band names are hard, man.
NADWORNY: Hard.
DIAZ: They’re very difficult, but they’re fun to think of, so thank you for noticing (laughter).
NADWORNY: Are these just little gifts to yourself when you’re writing?
DIAZ: They actually are. Yeah, it’s something to look forward to. Or it’s a form of productive procrastination. That’s what it is…
(LAUGHTER)
DIAZ: …Moderately productive. So she siphons electricity off the grid and uses it to power these weird punkish bands. This means that she becomes embroiled in this weird conspiracy that eventually leads her to a massive, outrageous invention, this big machine that has the potential of altering space-time and reality itself. But for all these complications and all the plot turns, I ended up discovering in the writing process that this is a novel about selfhood, about identity and about intimacy.
NADWORNY: Can you tell me a little bit about this world of the future?
DIAZ: There is an epoch that is coming to an end, which is the era of modernity, and this is very painful. We’re losing things that are extremely hurtful to lose.
NADWORNY: Education. Health.
DIAZ: Health, the rule of law that (ph) – we can begin there. And what do all these things that we’re mentioning have in common? The institution of the state, which has collapsed. So together with this pain also comes enormous hope, new forms of sociability, new communal organizations, new forms of family, away from the patriarchal nuclear family, new economies, lack of surveillance and supervision, the arts flourishing, and yes, now I arrive, a new way of being in with nature.
NADWORNY: I mean, that idea of this winding kind of, like, survivalist element of nature is throughout the whole book.
DIAZ: Yeah, I did read a lot about rewilding. There is a vast bibliography on this subject and biologists who study this. And it’s really remarkable how quickly in certain areas – a classic example is Chernobyl. Another one is the DMZ corridor between North and South Korea that is untrodden by humans. And it’s crazy how fast nature bounces back once the plague that is us goes away (laughter), yes.
NADWORNY: Plague that is us – so where does technology fit? Is that at odds with nature, at odds with us?
DIAZ: In fiction and in the world at large, we tend to associate technology with sort of eminently male techno-tchotchkes. I think technology is far more complex. Technology has been with us since we were cave dwellers because the greatest, most important, impressive machine that we’ve ever built is language. And all the inventions that came after were possible only because of this machine of language.
NADWORNY: So is discovery an element of human nature? I mean, it seems like that remains – this drive for science, technology, understanding. That’s at the center of the human nature as everything’s stripped away.
DIAZ: I believe so. I believe we have this unquenchable thirst, this appetite for knowledge, and I think it’s our most beautiful trait. And I think in the book, the more learned someone is, the more hubris there is in them, the more arrogance. And this is the history of human thought, of science, of philosophy, of art is this doomed – beautifully, gorgeously doomed struggle, and we keep going, knowing that it’s doomed. And that’s why it’s so noble.
NADWORNY: There are these huge passages in the book that are really scientific.
DIAZ: They are.
(LAUGHTER)
NADWORNY: To be honest, over my head.
DIAZ: No, no, they’re very gentle. There are lots of…
(LAUGHTER)
DIAZ: There are lots of comparisons for scale and to be able to grasp the ideas. Look, I have a few things to say about that. First, it’s not so many, and they’re not that long. And novels have always been very eager to present concepts in an aesthetically fulfilling way and in an emotionally rich way, at least in certain tradition, a tradition that I love. Try to read “Frankenstein” without the passages on natural philosophy. Try to read “Moby Dick” without the passages on cytology. Nothing is left of the novel, actually, if you do that.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
DIAZ: But these novels are also full of heart and brimming with emotion and excitement, at least from…
NADWORNY: And connection.
DIAZ: And connection.
NADWORNY: What does the book say about the self? What is self?
DIAZ: The whole point of the book is addressing that question. I didn’t know that that was the book that I was writing when I started out. I think the way in which we think about ourselves and our selfhoods, if I may, end up provoking profound, paradigmatic changes throughout history. Even the notion of experience, because of the mediation of technology, has changed immensely, right? So because for this reason and for other reasons, this notion of selfhood has changed so dramatically, new forms of community have emerged in the society. So this is one way.
NADWORNY: That would be like an example with community around music or arts or the way that family is formed in the book, which is nontraditional.
DIAZ: Absolutely correct. Yeah, there are three women at the core of this book who are in three different moments, stages in their lives, and the book builds up toward their relationship, how they interact.
NADWORNY: How do they interfere with each other’s trajectories?
DIAZ: Yes. To what extent are they superimposed as people? And this is a very important question that the book asks, but it also has to do with friendship and love.
NADWORNY: Hernan Diaz is the author of “Ply,” his latest novel. Thank you so much for talking with us.
DIAZ: This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
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