“I take issue with the word dystopia,” he replies. “I don’t think Ply is a dystopian novel.”
He follows this up with a broader critique of contemporary literary shorthand: “I think the word post-apocalyptic is absurd and oxymoronic. If there’s an apocalypse, there isn’t a ‘post.’ It’s an eschatological word. It’s the end!”
He notes the pattern of his interviewers with characteristic wit. “You used the word dystopia in your first question, and now you use the word nihilism, which I think is an important word. These terms are married, right?”
These early exchanges might make Diaz sound like a challenging subject for a journalist, but in person, he is quite the opposite—warm, thoughtful, and widely regarded as one of the kindest authors working today. Yet, he is hardly the only journalist who will be interrogating him about dystopias this month. Ply, Diaz’s eagerly anticipated third novel, is set in an urban future—strongly implied to be New York City—that has been thoroughly reclaimed by nature. It is depicted as an aesthetic landscape defined by nonexistent state capacity, remarkably low crime rates, and a dominant underground culture of post-punk shows.
It is not a dystopia, Diaz presses. It is something else entirely: a new way of life and a fundamentally new way of thinking.
“People in this world have lost a lot of things that are very painful to lose,” Diaz explains, listing the social safety net provided by the state, the rule of law, healthcare, and education. “Things that we take for granted, almost like air or water. We believe these things are natural, but they’re not. They’re constructs.”
As traditional society falls away, other elements disappear as well—elements that Diaz suggests “were absolutely worth losing.” These casualties of the old order include oppressive power structures, environmental suppression, and, most prominently in our current cultural moment, the relentless commodification of everyday life.
The protagonist of Ply is a nameless young woman known as a “pincher,” an independent operator who steals electricity from a spotty, decentralized grid and delivers it in battery form to various clients. Some of her customers are raucous musical groups, while others belong to shadier criminal elements. After making a major technical breakthrough in battery storage technology, the pincher finds herself caught directly in a high-stakes power struggle—pun intended—between local city kingpins.
While Ply functions fundamentally as a plot-centric novel, Diaz’s narrative arc is accompanied by a steady, philosophical stream of pontification. Lines like “There was freedom in dissolution, joy in disorder” and observations such as “Paranoia is not unlike religion” populate the text. Much like Diaz’s acclaimed debut, In the Distance, his new work can occasionally read like social theory masquerading as old-school adventure. This stylistic approach, however, is entirely by design.
“The modern novel since the 17th century has been the home of ideas and how to present them in a narrative, formally appealing way,” Diaz says. “I would dare say that is the partial definition of the novel, and what distinguishes it from other written art forms. All these novels that we think of as adventure novels, like The Count of Monte Cristo or H.G. Wells, they’re constitutional of the novel as a form. I don’t know at what point a literary umpire decreed that this was anathema, that if you can take something out without affecting the structure, you ought to take it out.”
In summation, Diaz asserts, “I feel that adventure gets a bad rap.”
Having grown up in Argentina and Sweden before establishing his life in New York in his twenties, Diaz has inadvertently completed an all-American triptych with his three novels. His bibliography now spans the pre-U.S. era explored in In the Distance, the peak-capitalism zenith of the U.S. captured in Trust, and now the post-U.S. landscape of Ply.
“It wasn’t deliberate to write this triumvirate of novels,” Diaz reflects. “I’m not that kind of writer. I’m really guided by emotion. It just so happens that I’m interested in the American canon and American history. As I was starting Ply, I saw the arc that you described. It was like, ‘Okay, I guess this is what I’m doing.’”
This description of his creative journey as entirely organic perhaps understates the rigorous legwork required for his projects. One would be hard-pressed to piece together a complex financial puzzle like Trust purely on the fly. Diaz is an unquestionably methodical researcher—a trait that undoubtedly stems from his academic background. In Ply, this exhaustive preparation becomes obvious when the pincher crosses paths with an eccentric physicist named Pola.
“In the Distance takes place in the West, and I’ve never ridden a horse in my life,” Diaz notes. “Trust is concerned with finance and capital, and I was a money idiot when I started writing that book. In the same way, writing Ply—I went to the shittiest high schools imaginable and then went straight into the humanities. So I didn’t have any physics background.”
To prepare for Ply, Diaz subjected himself to what he describes as a “really demanding” scientific crash course. He began with general physics explainers before diving straight into dense primary sources. “Then I would hit the math wall super hard,” he admits. After three or four years of independent study and possessing what he calls “a reasonable amount of knowledge,” he took a bold step. He cold-emailed a project director at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), openly professing his ignorance while asking for assistance in formulating a realistic particle physics invention for his upcoming novel.
“She engaged with me and invited me over,” Diaz says. “I spent the week 500 feet underground. It changed my intellectual life for sure. I had meetings with all these engineers and physicists. It was fun to see what a great time they had, being free to imagine [my book’s invention], talking about something completely impossible.”
While the central invention may technically be impossible, Diaz was determined to make Pola’s science feel notionally plausible. “It’s an act of generosity toward the readers,” he explains. “I’m not just going to make up sci-fi words, like…” He pauses to think for a moment. “…Hypertronic decongestant.”
Diaz also benefited from a 2024 writing residency at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, where he immersed himself in ongoing academic debates surrounding human consciousness.
“For all the physics,” he says, “for all the post-punk music, I think that this book is about selfhood. It’s about subjectivity. What is between us? Very literally, in a profoundly physical sense. This is the question at the core of the book.”
This exploration is echoed within the text by Pola, who observes: “If you accept, as you must, that we are a collection of cells, made up of molecules, made up of atoms, made up of elementary particles that are ruled by clearly defined physical laws, you must conclude that what we experience as ‘I’ has to be the result of the interaction of matter at this fundamental level. You, I, we emerge from this interaction. We are this interaction.”
Underpinning these metaphysical examinations is Diaz’s deep fascination with social constructs and history. Much of what modern society defines as subjectivity relies entirely on historical context and shared knowledge. The characters in Ply do not have a complete picture of their city’s bygone era—when a functioning state directed the construction of the skyscrapers and highways that now lie in ruins—yet they continually attempt to decipher its meaning.
As the pincher reflects within the novel: “Struggling to go back in time wasn’t just reactionary; it was insane. Inaugurating a president would be as absurd as crowning a pharaoh or appointing a caesar. Yes, the state was gone. […] But instead of returning to an obsolete order, why not find the advantages in this territorial fragmentation and institutional disintegration?”
Civilizational nostalgia emerges as a recurring theme throughout Ply. While modern parallels might easily be drawn to political movements pining for the perceived conformity of the 1950s, a more apt historical comparison might be found in medieval texts like the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, in which medieval scholars attempted to decipher the staggering ruins of Classical Rome.
“Politically, I’m very suspicious of nostalgia,” Diaz says. “I think it’s inevitably reactionary.”
Instead, Diaz finds himself drawn to a different kind of nostalgia—the personal variety born from childhood. Describing it as a “well of sweet, sad memories,” he notes that “that particular kind of longing is a vital texture for what I write. I think it has to do with the experience of loss.”
This emotional texture is most palpable in the dynamic between Pola, one of the city’s oldest inhabitants, and the young pincher. “I was interested in this relationship between an older and younger woman,” Diaz says. He recalls finding an old note in his margins regarding Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, which centers on a grandmother and her grandchild. “My note said, ‘A punk Summer Book in the future.’ I actually made myself laugh, which never happens.”
From an observer’s perspective, Diaz appears remarkably well-humored as he steps into the spotlight for his upcoming publicity whirlwind. One can easily imagine asking him about the Planck constant or humanity’s place in the cosmos.
Just remember to steer clear of the D-word.
