Hernan Diaz’s Grand Experiment

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.