PLY

A young woman is entangled in a literal power struggle over a postapocalyptic city’s electrical grid in the latest by Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer and Kirkus Prizes for Trust (2022).

Diaz’s unnamed protagonist is a “pincher,” someone who breaks into power lines to fuel batteries (aka “bricks”) that are used for currency, energy, and (her particular interest) electricity for live concerts. The story is set many generations in the future, following a long stretch of political and environmental collapse; society is practically post-literate, with scant populations occupying “vaguely sovereign” city-states. The pincher’s gift for brick engineering has caught the scrutiny of one observer, which is troubling news in this “shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur”; she doesn’t need the scrutiny of the private power company, or the shady moblike figures who seem to regulate commerce in the city. The identity of the pincher’s stalker proves to be more complicated, and it opens up the second half of the novel, which is focused on the idea of creating a new utopian society and the potential of warping the space-time continuum to get there. Trust seduced readers and critics with its clever shifting of context and perspective, and though this novel isn’t as overtly playful, Diaz uses the quantum physics subplot to tinker with questions of how we perceive ourselves and what our identities become when they’re run through others’ filters. The rhetorical subtleties this demands (points of view, tenses, and pronouns get deliberately wobbly) makes this a less immediately engrossing novel than its predecessor. But as the title suggests, there are layers of rhetorical gambits that reward rereading. And Diaz always returns to a simple but demanding question: To build a better world, how deeply must we get into the heads of the people around us?

A brainy, challenging, and engrossing trek into a battered but unbeaten future.