“It’s music you feel on your skin”: Author Hernan Diaz on the post-punk scene and future science in his new book Ply

Polit Bureau, Seagrave, Mucho Pelo, the Children. Hernan Diaz’s third novel Ply takes place in a future New York City, one in which life expectancy is way down, public services are gone and both energy ('Tensor') and water ('Flow') are controlled by one big, shady corporation, CTS, and its security apparatus. This crumbling speculative city is being slowly reclaimed by flora and fauna but art still matters: it’s also populated by underground bands — with excellent names — who need help powering their experimental live shows at venues like the Newsroom and the Dead Fountain.

That’s where Diaz’s unnamed protagonist, the pincher, comes in. She gets her name from her profession: stealing electricity from the main grid, which is unavailable to many of the lower ‘downtown’ classes. Her invention of a new form of power storage ‘brick’, in turn, leads her to a strange, ‘flunk’-addicted scientist and one near-impossible physics project involving a CERN-style accelerator and the search for a fundamental subatomic particle.

After the success of Diaz’s bestseller Trust, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and which currently has a HBO TV adaptation starring Kate Winslet in development, almost everything about Ply feels like a deliberate turn into uncharted territory. It’s a fascinating collision of themes and subject matters which deploys literary experimentation, including a mid-point ‘fold’ in narration and some freewheeling final pages, that matches the ambition of his characters’ higher-minded schemes. We caught up with Diaz via Zoom from his book-filled home in Brooklyn, to talk about big ideas in gritty places.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Shortlist: When you were talking about your previous novel Trust, you did a lovely video about how you worked in the New York Public Library, and in the acknowledgments to this book you mention CERN and a few other science labs. I wondered where did the first germ of the idea for Ply come from and where was this book written?

Hernan Diaz: The germs of ideas are complicated. The birth of an idea is very obscure to me. I don't know quite how it happens. I know it has to do with a lot of reading and listening to music and watching films. I got this idea almost at the same time I got the idea for Trust, and they both coexisted in my head for a long time. In the end, I decided to go with the novel about capital over the novel about technology. But, you know, I kept thinking of what would become Ply all the time. So it's been gestating for at least a decade.

And then it was written a little bit all over the place, mostly in Brooklyn, which is where I live. I was lucky enough to get help from different fellowships that meant that I wrote some parts in Sweden, which is where I spent my childhood, some parts in Italy. And, you know, I'm also on the road for work a tonne and I feel very lucky to be able to do so. But I would say this is a very Brooklyn novel in terms of where it was written geographically and also in terms of its spirit.

Well, let's stick on that to start with: your beautifully rendered future city. I'm a big sucker for plants taking over, animals reclaiming cities… In terms of your process, was it characters first and then you think about where to situate them, or was it the city first?

Look, I'm not super methodical. I am very precise and controlled on the sentence level. It's not spontaneous. It's very deliberate and slow and painstaking. But when it comes to the project as a whole, I'm not a drafter. I'm not an outliner. I don't have the cool Post-it notes on the wall with the whole structure. It all comes into being as I write. And because I write very slowly, the way in which it comes into being feels cohesive. Like, it's messy in other ways, but not in that way. There's ample time for me to think ahead a few steps and see how things will play out. So I don't know what came first and what came second. I think it was all part of the same narrative gesture. I wanted a very tough but fragile protagonist in a tough but fragile environment. I think they both came as different manifestations of the same emotional texture.

You're right, the ‘what came first’ is a boring question. So talk to me more about this tough but fragile environment then of this city.

Well, I think the title, Ply, refers to many things. One of them is that the novel takes place at a historical juncture that I conceived of as a fold. It's the end of one epoch and the incipient birth throes of the next one. So it's a moment of great precariousness and a lot of the guarantees that we take for granted today that are mostly to do with the institution of the state, from the rule of law to public services, all of that has vanished, which is, I think, a trend that we see today. And this is, of course, very painful, and it comes at a great human cost.

But at the same time, these people in this imagined future have lost many things that are absolutely worth losing, that have to do with the alienation of our everyday life, the commodification of interpersonal relationships, the constant surveillance we're under. All of that is gone too, which is lovely.

That also implies new social constructs and contracts, new familial relationships outside of the patriarchal nuclear family, new economies that don't have to do with the capitalist model, a thriving art scene and a new relationship to nature that is not debased to being a contextual kind of phenomenon, but something that is us and an awareness of that. And ultimately a new idea of what being a human being means and what selfhood means. That is at the core of the novel. Going back to your question, the city is an embodiment of these tensions, of the ugliness of the end of a historical process, but also the enormous promise of what lies ahead.

In the character of Acevedo we have a “tinker” [an engineer and repairer of goods] who represents one version of this sort of community-based anarchy in the absence of state-run public services. I thought it was very beautiful that your protagonist, the pincher, rejects his mentorship for love, which is, you know, very irrational.

I know.

She could have had it all! But yeah, what are some of the intellectual underpinnings of Acevedo's worldview?

Yeah, well, Acevedo is sort of this monkish, very austere character in the book that takes in this recently orphaned protagonist under his wing and nourishes her talents, and while doing so expounds on his worldview. It's a novel of ideas very unapologetically, that's what the book is enormously about. There's also a noirish subplot, the wild science in it. There is also friendship and love and betrayal and trust. But I think I was drawn to the tradition of novels of ideas.

So some of these characters have, let's call them philosophical programs or manifestos in their minds. And I agree partially with all of them, and I disagree to some extent with all of them as well. I'm a friend of ambiguity. I like that. I think it's the natural habitat of literature, this kind of opaque, undetermined territory. I'm not particularly drawn to novels which claim to have it all figured out.

So I think what seem to be moments of great certainty in the book, like when this character speaks or when the scientist lectures in the second section of the novel, are indeed actually moments of great doubt. Like, what is salvageable in these thoughts? What can be rescued? What helps us think about our circumstances and what is, on the other hand, blow-hardiness? There are always those characters in my work who are catastrophically sure of themselves.

I do want to talk about the music and resistance of it all in Ply. So tell me about the relationship between them, because it seems quite unique to me. The drugs in this live music scene affect the body, as does the music, directly.

Yeah, well, our scientist is a drug addict, our narrator-protagonist is an alcoholic… But the music scene was very important to me. I always write about music in my books, and my previous novel Trust was a very musical novel. It's formally structured as a sonata, and music plays a big role there. But here I was interested in, especially, the post-punk scene, more than the first wave of punk, because it's music that truly takes place in space. It's music that makes us really aware of the vibrancy of space as an element, right? It's music that you feel more on your skin than in your brain or in your ears.

Also the DIY ethos of the whole movement and working with very limiting objective constraints, normally with very shitty gear and with a lack of musical education, which is presented as a virtue, of course. There's nothing shameful about it at all. But what I care about, in this context, is how great what came out of those limitations was. That to me speaks to the world of Ply, a world that is very limited but also very freeing and freed in very similar ways. I was very drawn to having this completely outrageous futuristic invention in this very gritty context.

None of your bands come on stage and shout “fuck Tensor”, there's none of that first wave of punk, like you said. Do you know this idea of ‘above the neck’ and ‘below the neck’ in music? Like perhaps the pincher doesn't fully understand the structure of the piece but she is feeling it and it is transforming her. So you maybe make a case for abstract art.

This is a book so much about physicality, in the widest possible sense, from the body to particle physics. I love to write about music and it's very challenging because it can be super cringey very fast. It can become super embarrassing.

I find it the most difficult art form to write about by far, yeah.

Oh yeah, I agree. Because it has to do with intensity, it's very hard to write about intensity. It's like writing about sex. It's impossible. So I did want for the music not to be described in intellectual terms, but as a physical experience, both as something taking place in a literal sense in space, but also how it registers on the body. So those were my parameters around how to talk about music.

If we stick on this idea of connecting with people, this is a book that does include a heist and colourful characters and double crossings. So talk to me about combining the novel of ideas with that accessibility and reaching mass audiences?

That's a great question. You know, I think it has to do with the fact that I'm a very greedy reader and writer. I like very conflicting experiences. I love, love novels that make me feel the viscosity of language, language that makes me slow down. I was a former philosophy student, so there's nothing slower than that, right? So, I like that feeling of operating in that gear where everything really comes to a grinding halt. And you experience syntax, you experience punctuation, you experience every single lexical choice. And that's pleasure to me.

But I also love the opposite end of that spectrum when you forget language. I also love forgetting that I'm reading. Dickens is the best example for me. I forget that I'm holding a book. I'm being held by the book and everything vanishes. And you know what I'm talking about. And it's great.

And I want both of those things. I really try to do that in everything that I write. I am not shy to have these hyper kind of conceptual moments, but then I love like go-go-go-go-go speed. So I went for that here as well, probably more than anywhere else.

Yeah, you achieve it. With the scientist character Pola’s mysterious disc at the center of her scientific experiment.. the narrative can be seen as a series of, like you said, physical impacts on the characters, the disc being the sort of final one. Were you listening to music or in an altered state when you were writing those passages?

Oh God, I listen to music all the time when I write. I have a nine-hour-long playlist of purely instrumental music. So yeah, I have sort of my musical canon that reflects very well what the novel sounds like, not just the music, but emotionally what the novel sounds like to me.

One of the things I picked up on is that the more you learn about science, the more scientists tell you how much they don't know. And the more you learn about art, the more you see the underlying patterns of say, music and how that might relate to science or maths. So, talk to me about that. There seems to be a hardening of the two sides, whether that’s down to AI or other technology and then the humanities get left off to the side.

I mean, I had to learn about particle physics to write this book. I thought it was a tribute to or an acknowledgement of the intelligence of the reader to present this mad invention in a way that was coherent and viable. I mean, this machine can never be built for a bunch of engineering reasons, which are actually presented in the book itself. But it is theoretically kind of possible.

It would have been much easier for me just to make up a bunch of sophisticated tech sounding words and just be done with it, as they do in most science fiction films. You just drop a few words that are meaningless and they're kind of tokens of futurity and of scientific and technological complexity, and you move on with your plot. I very much did not want to do that. I wanted for the invention to have substance because the scientific ideas behind it are so gorgeous and so beautiful and counterintuitive that it seemed like a missed opportunity not to present them as beautifully and succinctly as I could to the reader.

So I think we, in the arts, tend to think that the hard sciences are very dismissive toward what we do. I think there's great truth in that. This is a generalisation but there is this sense of: you guys as artists deal in myths, in fables. You're like the decorators or pastry chefs of the world. Whereas we, the scientists, deal with the truth, with facts, and we are purveyors of what truly matters, of the essence. You just do the fluff. Obviously, I take great issue with this. I think art has proven again and again and again to have a very intimate relationship to truth.

I think the novel, specifically, is the best technology we have to imagine what it is like to be in someone else's consciousness. That is the territory of literature. Nobody else can do that, right? But what I've also learned is that we artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians know very little about what's going on in science. And just to use physics as an example, I'll speak for myself. I lived in a completely Newtonian world. Fully, I was there. No centuries had elapsed at all. And I think this is true for a lot of people who really don't know what the standard model is or how matter behaves at the quantum level, at the subatomic level, or how special or general relativity works. These concepts are, by and large, alien to most of the people in my world. I'm not the exception, I'm actually proof of how alien they are.

I think there is a lot of work to do in terms of a conversation between science and the arts. And I've been lucky enough to have engaged with physicists here in the United States and in Europe. I went to CERN, I went to Geneva, I spent a week there, 150 feet underground with back-to-back meetings every day with theoretical and experimental physicists, like eight hours a day.

Oh wow.

I also was the writer-in-residence here in New York at the Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, so I spoke with neuroscientists for a year and a half, and I was very hungry for what they had to say, and they, I think, were very excited about the place that imagination could have in their work.

What kind of conversations were you having there?

Well, it's incredible. It's a beautiful state-of-the-art facility with many teams of researchers and labs running different projects in every aspect of neuroscience. It's home to a couple of Nobel laureates. It's a very serious hardcore place. As someone who comes mostly from a tradition of continental philosophy, rooted in idealism, it was a big eye-opener for me. I've been raised intellectually in a very dualistic kind of tradition: mind versus body, ideas versus sensorial manifestations, noumena versus phenomena, res cogitans (thinking matter) versus res extensa, (tangible matter). The list goes on and on. And this is how many of us have been raised. And for me to be exposed to these scientists at this center was a complete revolution.

This is all in the novel, of course. I find it quite impossible to uphold this paradigm, to think that there is something in us that is kind of untethered and unmoored and unanchored from our physical frame, that is immaterial, and that this immaterial bit of our selfhood is actually what defines us as conscious sentient beings. So what truly makes us is something that is completely ethereal and can't be pinned down in any way and is radically divorced from matter. I can no longer believe in that. It's just... it's over. I cannot. Like, I view that as almost believing in Santa Claus or something. It's impossible for me. On the contrary, I think we/ I/ you/ me are the result of immensely complicated interactions between matter and forces, and I find this harder to explain and more fascinating and more complex than the other rather simplistic and superstitious explanation. It's all in on the materialistic approach.

My experience at the Mind Brain Institute had a big role to play in this, but it's not disconnected from quantum mechanics or particle physics, the idea that all macroscopic systems emerge from the interaction of matter at this very elementary level. This, of course, raises important and decisive questions like, who am I truly? And who are you? And how can we hope to relate to one another? What is the space between us? And I was trying to phrase this as pithily as I could in the novel with the example of the sun: when you look at the sun and a photon hits your eye, like, what is really the difference between you and the sun? Where does one end and the other begin? We need to rethink these boundaries of selfhood, and I find these questions very, very, very appealing.

With your character Pola, she's extremely attuned to the difference between genius and mental illness and how others might view her. There's this idea, isn't there, that to reach greatness, you might have to stretch a bit further than other people are comfortable with?

I mean, I've always been interested in the figure or the trope of the “mad scientist”. I used to be a university professor and I taught a semester-long seminar on mad scientists. And what draws me to this figure is that it amalgamates what we think culturally as the absence of reason, incorrectly of course, which is madness, and also equally incorrectly, the apex of reason, science. So you have these two extremes again amalgamated into one term: mad scientist. And this to me is a very productive dissonance, right?

It speaks to the porous boundaries of reason, and also the criminalisation and the punitive perception of madness that we've had, at least in the West, forever, still to this day. Most of these, always in air quotes, “mad scientists” have a very problematic relationship to the law. You know, they're lawbreakers. They break the laws of nature, and they also break the laws of man, as they're called. They're usually criminals, hell-bent on global domination. So I find this figure to be extremely interesting, their single-mindedness and their monomaniacal kind of drive and their hubris.

And a lot of them are complete drug addicts and that is science impacting the subject itself, right? It's these chemicals that are being taken into this body. So it's kind of the absorption of technology. All of this becomes even more complicated when you think of a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, a hyper-classic, overly quoted book on the philosophy of science, where he famously defines a reigning scientific paradigm as a ‘normal’ science. But, in this context, if you dwell on the word normal, it has a completely new resonance. So it makes sense that scientific revolutions would be abnormal, or again, air quotes, “crazy” right?

Right. Obviously you've learned a lot about physics and neuroscience throughout the process of working on Ply, but what have you learned about writing fiction to carry forward?

My ambition as a writer is to not be recognised in my book. You know how everyone talks about having a voice? I don't want to ever have a voice. I want each book to be new, to break new ground for me and to be texturally and orally, like acoustically different. In this one, the syntax is completely new to me. I'm writing sentences in a new way for the most part. Sometimes I go back to something that I recognise as me but then I try to hide it.

For the most part, I've been writing about the past before. Now I'm writing about the future. So how do you make a believable future? That's something I had to teach myself, how to make that world not silly to begin with. That's the first thing you feel when the future fails, it just feels lame and stupid. So what are the parameters to achieve verisimilitude in a future setting? What do you resort to? I think that was one of the biggest things.

Also how to write about youth. I'm not young anymore. I have a teenage daughter whom I adore, and this book had her in mind at all times. And so how to capture that, or how to remember that freshness and that hunger and that elation. Those were things that I had to learn to write about.

• Hernan Diaz’s Ply is out now in the UK, published by Picador

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