Ply
Many books about the future are ways of thinking through the problems of the present. One of the difficulties with Ply is that it seems to want to do this but never quite settles on what to say ... Both more emphatic and more confusing ... he more time we spend with them, the more The book’s inchoate political energy dissipates ... You can’t fault Diaz for lack of ambition. As a title, Ply is a slippery, clever choice ... Regrettably, the grand intellectual ambitions of Ply finally overwhelm the other desiderata of fiction ... The narrative energy of Ply keeps getting derailed, not least because two of its main characters exist mostly to lecture us.
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Ply...has some tricks up its sleeve, but its best idea — the one implied by its title and the abrupt shift in perspective — arrives late. This idea is so big and offers so many narrative possibilities that you might end up lamenting all that time spent running round the city with the pincher and her pals during the first half of the book ... There are also shades of young adult fiction in those early scenes that may dissatisfy readers drawn in by Diaz’s Pulitzer credentials ... It’s possible that by unmooring himself from history, Diaz has given himself a little too much freedom ... Ply seems intent on telling multiple stories at once and can’t fully commit to any of them.
Diaz renders the world as remarkably recognizable: the narrator’s parents opened a used bookstore in an abandoned bar, militant 'volunteers' cling to an idea of law and order that threatens individual freedom, and the city is split between downtown’s scrappier streets and the wealthier residents of Uptown. Another noteworthy work from the celebrated Argentine American novelist.
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