Setting and style

Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Ply, moves away from the multi‑voiced formal experiment that made Trust a critical and commercial success and instead offers a spare, speculative epic set in a depopulated city several centuries into the future. Diaz does not name a time or place, but the accumulation of details points strongly to a version of New York City reclaimed by nature: streets stalked by lynx and deer, a downtown swamp where trees and climbers pull collapsing buildings into spongy soil, and a landscape described as a shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur.

Themes and influences

Readers will find echoes of J.G. Ballard in Diaz’s depiction of urban rewilding and environmental decay, and the novel continues the author’s interest in how narrative shapes perception. Where Trust interrogated memory, representation and the fictitious nature of wealth through competing accounts, Ply places similar intellectual concerns inside a speculative framework that contrasts the ruined city with hints of a technologically sophisticated life persisting beyond its limits.

Strengths and limitations

Many reviewers have praised Ply for its measured prose and the ambition of its big ideas — a kind of austere, philosophical science fiction that foregrounds setting and concept over conventional plot. Yet that very restraint has also been a point of contention: lengthy expository passages and the novel’s preoccupation with theoretical questions frequently crowd out close, emotionally textured character work. The result, critics say, is a book that impresses intellectually but can feel dry and distanced on a human level.

Assessment

Ply will appeal to readers who value conceptual rigor and atmospheric worldbuilding and to those interested in how contemporary authors adapt modernist and speculative traditions to address questions about environment, technology and social memory. For readers seeking immersive character drama or fast narrative propulsion, however, Diaz’s emphasis on ideas and exposition may be wanting. As a follow‑up to a prizewinning novel, Ply confirms Diaz’s continued ambition while dividing opinion over whether his austere approach here serves his material or limits its emotional reach.