- American history welcomes fiction.

It is eager to tell these tales about itself.

Some of them are completely horrific, and others are liberating, wonderful, and glorious in their egalitarianism, you know, from Whitman on, both ends of the spectrum.

But more than American history, I'm writing more about that, about the ways in which the United States dreams about itself.

(upbeat music) - This is "American Masters: Creative Spark," and I'm your host, Joe Skinner.

Our guest is Hernan Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who's back with his third novel.

The book is called "Ply," and like his previous works, "In the Distance" and "Trust," he's exploring America as an idea, but this time, in a far distant future.

The expansive story covers a lot of ground, humanity's relationship to time and selfhood, the DIY music scene and art, friendship and the mother-daughter relationship, quantum mechanics and more.

It's a book that's brimming with ideas.

Thank you so much for coming in.

- Thank you.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

- So we're here to talk about "Ply," and an idea that I always really love is this idea that art is useless.

And I say that only in the sense that it's useless in sort of a capitalist society in a way, in that you're putting a lot of input into something sometimes without getting the capital gains from it per se.

That's what I love about art.

I love that it feels like something that is inherently subversive in the society that we live in.

And I say this only because that's a feeling I had while I was reading "Ply," and I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

- Well, we do live in a society ruled by universal exchange, and every interpersonal relationship we enter into, most of them, are mediated by money and by instrumental reason.

They are towards something else.

Hence, exchange.

I think there are probably two exceptions to this.

One is love, and I include friendship within that.

True love is untainted by this.

And the other one is art.

I understand that art can be a commodity too, of course, but the aesthetic experience, I think, is either before, or beyond, or transcends those boundaries.

And I think you're perfectly right in saying that therein lies the subversive quality that art has in a society that is geared toward exchange and instrumentalization because it refuses to be reduced to that logic.

It is, in a joyful way, pure waste.

It's, hopefully, a waste of time.

And I defend that.

I stand by that.

And I wanted to, in a way, thematize that or talk about that in "Ply."

"Ply," among other things, it is a novel about art.

I'm sure we'll talk about other aspects of it as well, but it takes place in a future society where we have lost a number of things that we take for granted and that are painful to lose.

We're witnessing their erosion today, and I think it's just a historical tendency that will keep devolving in that direction.

And, again, it will come at a great human cost.

There is no doubt about it, and I'm not romanticizing or aestheticizing that.

However, I think we're also in the process of losing things that are completely worth losing, which have to do with the alienation of our everyday life, the commodification of experience, and, again, overall a sense of deep control, which is what defines, I think, at the end of the day, the society will live in.

So it's trying to depict, in a non-hippie, kind of flower-garland-wearing way, what a possible glimpse of the birth of a utopia would look like.

And at the core of it, I think it's exactly what you said.

It's the liberation of time.

- I love the music that is in the book.

I came of age in a time in New York where the underground music scene, the DIY music scene, as we called it, was just thriving.

Where are you drawing from for that part of the book?

- I too got to experience sort of the last throws of the '90s in New York, which were, I suppose, a pale reflection of the late '70s and '80s, which is the true golden age of that type of music and culture in New York City.

But I did get my experience living in a loft that was falling apart that was $5 a month, and, you know, the fire department tried to evict us from it every day.

And there was very little sleep, and the whole building was going on 24-seven.

So I was ostensibly working on my PhD.

That didn't go so well during the years I was living there.

(laughs) So I feel fortunate that I got to live that, also at the right age, you know, in my 20s.

I care deeply about music.

I have written quite extensively about music.

My previous book, "Trust," has overtly the form of a sonata.

It's in four movements with the last movement being a coda that picks up the motifs of the previous ones, especially the first one.

And music is a great part of the denouement of the book itself, right?

There's quite a bit of musical theory in "Trust."

Here, I was interested in a different kind of music that has to do more than with punk, with the post-punk scene, which I find very interesting because it retains that rawness, that repetitiveness, the loudness, the aggressivity in some cases, and the deliberate ugliness in some cases.

But there is also the presence of other musical traditions that I'm very interested in, such as electronic music that was coming into its own during those years, and German electronic music very specifically from Stockhausen to Cluster.

I don't know, you name any kind of composer or band that you can think of.

Music concert as well was there.

And in America and the United States, the tradition of minimalism influenced greatly this second wave of punk music.

So it is an amalgamation of musical styles that I find immensely appealing.

(intense electronic music) I am also drawn to the fact, and this is something that I do quite deliberately in the book, that it is an art form that offers a certain degree of resistance.

And this harks back to your initial question of universal exchange.

Exchanges ought to be quick, right?

Because you need to move on to the next transaction.

So I am personally interested in art, in any kind of medium, that slows down, that explores a different gear, that goes into another kind of velocity, that makes you feel the viscosity of the medium that is being explored.

And this happens very much, both in this music that offers a resistance... I mean, the most obvious one is dissonance, right, which is something that you want to resolve in your ear and in your brain and that refuses to come.

Another thing is, as I was saying a moment ago, stasis.

This is repetitive music.

I mentioned that, but it's also droning music that explores more than evolution, narrative evolution and development.

It's interested in stasis, in a suspension of time, narrative time, musical time.

These are all things that I'm very interested in.

I am also interested in the gesture of provocation, of presenting these obstacles in a thoughtful way to the reader.

I think something is to be gained through that.

I want them for myself as a reader.

And lastly, this book is also very much concerned with the physicality of space, right?

There's a lot of talk about what space, as a physical entity, is.

And I think that this kind of music that is very loud and, again, very repetitive, and it's something that you experience more perhaps than in your ears and in your brain, you experience on your skin, right?

And last week I went to see, actually in Brooklyn, I went to see Kim Gordon and Bill Nace opened for her, and there was this beautiful tsunami of noise.

And I had the experience of being submerged in an element that wasn't quite air.

And I was made to feel very aware of space as something coming into being, a space emerging all around me.

And this was possible because of this music.

And this is what I wanted to write into the book.

(intense electronic music) - I really fell in love with art for the first time with exactly this kind of music and East Coast noise music from the '80s, '90s and 2000s and Japan noise music as well from the same era.

- Right.

- And exactly that feeling of visceral qualities while also forced to think about the meta qualities of music.

And just that combination is something that got me so jazzed on "Ply" while I was reading it.

- Yeah.

Oh, that's lovely to hear.

And as a footnote, you could think that this experience that, in a way, suspends intellectual engagement, in a way, not in others, but in some way, you could think of it as escapism.

I experience it as the opposite.

I live it as pure presence, as being aware of my body and of my body being part of a larger system that contains, touches, and modifies it, but it's a heightened form of presence.

It's not escapism at all.

- It was so fun for me to see this thing I've thought a lot about with music over the years translated into the written form, which is how I perceived much of "Ply," this idea of having a text that is operating in kind of opposing ways that one is immersive and visceral, and you can read it as a story, but then, the other side of it is intellectual, and meta, and removed.

And how do you combine those disparate qualities?

- I'm very greedy, both as a writer and as a reader.

I want everything out of a text.

And I was talking a while ago about experiencing the materiality of, in this case, language, of just feeling syntax and feeling a sense of wonder at the architecture of a sentence, and just looking at how subordination works, and what is happening with lexical choices, and what is going on with tense, and how yummy does this word sound next to this other word.

And this is nothing to do with character, scene, or the diegetic narrative, propulsive dimension of the text at all.

This is just a sense of awe, and wonder, and delight, hopefully, at the pure matter of the thing, right?

You could say all these same things for tone, and texture, and tempo, and attack, and music and articulation, and it has nothing to do with development.

It's just that.

It's your body interacting with this thing, with this matter.

I love these moments, and I feel that they are also highly intellectual in the sense that they demand a certain understanding of the medium that is under consideration, right, of having sort of a taste for language in general, or musical language for that matter.

However, I also love, love the opposite feeling, the feeling of forgetting that I'm holding a book and being, instead, held by the book.

How fantastic is to be transported in such a way?

Dickens is, for me, the prime example of that where I just look up from the page at a certain moment, and I'm no longer in the East End of London or whatever, and I'm no longer in the 19th century surrounded by mist.

I'm in Brooklyn, and I really feel that jolt.

I live for those moments, but I want both things in what I write.

And I'm hoping that I will always retain that freedom for myself of not being married to a certain kind of aesthetic program or dogma, according to which I need to pursue one kind of aesthetic effect.

I hope to be joyfully promiscuous forever and pursue these different kind of emotional and intellectual palettes.

- Does your process change from book to book, and how do you go about balancing those two sides of the story in your process?

- Everything changes from book to book.

There is no constant, there is no common denominator.

There are no dogmas or manifestos that underlie what I work.

My goal as a writer is to never have a voice.

I don't want one.

Thank you very much.

I also think there is a bizarre fetish around that, which is the fetish of selfhood.

And I think we live, very clearly, in a moment in time where this idea of identity and how unique each one of us is is kind of played up to pathological extents.

If you think about it, we're all working with something... As writers, we're all working with something that exceeds us, and precedes us, and will outlive us, over which we have zero control, and that is the institution of language.

So whatever you do, you do within those parameters that are objective in the sense that they're not subjective.

They don't belong to you in absolutely any way.

Already, this puts a major dent in the notion of voice because you're basing it on something that is not yours to begin with.

Add to that, the fact that you're working within a canon, within a tradition, that could be as quirky, weird or unexpected as you wish.

Maybe it's your canon made up by writers that only you and three other people know, but still, you are being influenced by them.

So I think the notion of voice, in itself, is polyphonic, and stratified, and choral.

And to be musical, again, it's a cluster.

It's a chord, right, made up by different, well, in harmony you would call them voices as well, right?

So I reinvent or I invent, not re-, but simply invent a kind of position for each book that will vary.

I mean, hopefully, you would never be able to train a large language model system to write anything that I write because everything will be different enough and there would be no possibility of doing so.

I hope this doesn't sound arrogant.

I'm just describing what I want to do.

And it's very much... You know, I try to keep it new, as Pound's sort of imperative went, but for myself.

And I think it's the honest thing to do for the way in which I look at art.

There has to be a certain degree of adventurousness and risk.

And I am actually kind of very interested in adventure literature.

I think it's an underrated genre.

I think it has to do with... I think it's a very deep genre because it ultimately has to do with death.

That's what you're trying to escape or the hero is trying to escape constantly.

So it's written with that horizon in mind at all times.

And I think that adventurous spirit, the sense of high stakes of risk, ought to be on the page.

I think that is a great part of what makes something feel alive.

I know that I feel it when I read something that is written under that kind of pressure, as opposed to someone who is an epigone of themselves.

- And in very concrete terms, how do you write?

- So I knew I wanted to write about technology in the United States.

I don't think we can understand the United States, especially after the industrial revolution, without thinking about technology.

And it seems that I've been writing about the United States.

Despite, you know, my intentions, it just happened that way.

And so I started reading a little bit haphazardly, not knowing exactly where this was going, and I wanted a very clean invention.

I knew there was going to be sort of a, let's call it a mad scientist involved, which is a trope that I'm very interested in, but I didn't know what the invention was going to be.

I wanted to be able to summarize it in a sentence that I knew that was the only... It couldn't be baroque, or abstruse, or complicated.

So I went all in on that, and I read about this world for a number of years.

I want to say maybe three, four years.

And I started when I was editing "Trust."

So it's been going on for a long time.

And, eventually, I met with scientists, and that's the science part, but that's not all of it.

I think what started out being a book about science ended up being a book about selfhood, and subjectivity, and consciousness, and the mind, and the possibility of two minds interacting with each other, and what the difference truly is, if any, between you and me.

And I think being immersed in the paradigm of particle physics gave me a different approach to that because it's a world where everything is relational, and you can't understand any one entity separated from another system.

And I think if you take that seriously, it has an enormous impact on our idea of our own selves.

- [Joe] I mean, it's interesting that you- - Is this too obscure?

- Not at all.

No, no.

It's interesting that you find your way into writing about America in one way or another.

And to me, if you're writing about America, to write about the idea of selfhood and individualism seems to be part and parcel, right?

It seems to be fundamental to the idea of America.

- What a gorgeous question or intervention.

I just want to just leave now because it's perfect.

Like we're done.

Absolutely.

I think the more you study the history of this country, I think such a great part of it is built on the rivalry of the individual against the institutions.

I'm not saying it's the cornerstone, but it's definitely one of the pillars.

And it is so present and so pervasive in our culture forever, you know, since the first people who arrived from Europe on these shores did so because of that very reason, because of an institutional rift.

If you look at the myths of this country, it's always like that.

It's the pioneer going West solo.

It's the vigilante going against the law to preserve justice, going against the sheriff, for example.

It is the tycoon as well.

It's the self-made man, right?

That's a very American thing.

Again and again, it's about selfhood and individuality.

It is about the detective who, again, is at odds with the institutional law embodied, in this case, in the police, in the police force as the representation and embodiment of the state.

It is crucially, crucially the superhero who is completely above all of the laws, the laws of men, but also the laws of nature; they fly, right?

And for some reason, all of these people, from the cowboy and their poncho or their trench coat, to the detective, to the superhero, they all have flowing capes.

Someone needs to figure out why.

But I think the supremacy of the individual and this singing to oneself is, for sure, a very American thing.

But I do also think that we are at a point in history now... And I talk about this very overtly in the book.

We are in a point of history where the very notion of what it means to be human, the definition of human, is in crisis.

And we've been there before, like over a 1,000 years ago with the advent of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment, that drove the whole train of modernity up to this point, implied a change in the definition of human.

It put the human at the center as opposed to God, obviously.

Humans now were capable of change, of evolution, both socially and biologically, which is a very new idea, right?

The notion of the individual, also rooted in its counterpart of private property, became very important.

You can't really think of this notion of selfhood without thinking of private property, right?

I mean, not for nothing, Hobbes in "Leviathan" says that this is the one principle that kind of precludes the war of all against all.

It's private property.

It's right there.

So I think this idea of selfhood becomes ingrained with capital, with the institutions of modernity as well.

And this is now kind of being broken.

We are in the process of somehow, not that I trust this in any way, and we're not going down this road in this conversation I hope, but we're in the process of outsourcing our consciousness.

I mean, that's the goal.

I don't think we're there.

Not even close.

But, again, fodder for a different moment.

Our experience of the world is also mediated by technology in ways that it never has.

Regulated currencies are also kind of on the verge of collapse.

The modern state looks very different, you know, as it did, you know, after World War II.

It's a short period of time, but it looks very different.

So I think the notion of individuality, going back to the beginning of this, is also changing.

And I would even go further.

I think all the other societal changes are coming because our notion of selfhood is changing.

I do not think... And I think a lot of sociologists and economists, this is a little bit arrogant, got it wrong.

I don't think that this perception of selfhood is some kind of epiphenomenal froth that is on top of structural, material conditions.

I think it's the reverse.

I think the way in which we think of ourselves as humans determine the ways in which we interact with the world.

- Yeah, I mean, individuality is so ingrained in my being as being an American and everything you're taught here, that just thinking about a world beyond it is like thinking about after death in a way.

- That's right.

Yeah.

It's impossible to look beyond that paradigm because it's a world-defining paradigm.

So, yeah.

- It feels like something that I interpreted to be a thrust of why we're looking at how many years in the future imply.

My reading of it was we're seeing a world in which the current policies in our world go to the nth degree and see what happens.

And like you said at the beginning of this conversation, there's an interesting collapse of many things and an interesting rebirth of other things.

And many people assume we're on just like a linear track of progress, and that's how they view humanity or a track towards dissent, but people don't often think of things as a cycle.

- [Hernan] Yeah.

- And "Ply" feels like it's suggesting more of a cycle.

- Oh, yeah, I think we've all become too enamored with some sort of kind of historical teleology or eschatology that there is a sense of direction, that there is an idea, to put it kind of almost in a Hegelian kind of sense, that we're moving forward, we're moving toward that.

Needless to say, I don't think that is the case.

I think also, you know, I think that I've been thinking about a lot while I was writing "Ply" was literacy, for example, which is something that we all take for granted, right?

The sense of universal literacy.

And it's a very new phenomenon.

How old is it?

We were talking about Dickens a moment ago.

There are illiterate characters in Dickens in his novels.

My grandmother was illiterate and learned how to read and write poorly late in life.

And so it's really a blip, you know, this idea that the written word is accessible to everyone.

It wasn't for most of human history.

It is kind of, kind of now, and I don't know if it will keep on being so.

And I think this post-literate trend will take other shapes.

People will communicate in other kind of visual forms that are not necessarily based on the alphabet.

And I think I'm just bringing this up as an example of how things definitely are not linear, but also not necessarily regressive.

I think that's another danger.

I think sort of the fetish of evolution is just as dangerous as, to my mind, nostalgia.

And to think that the past was always better and that we maybe were regressing or... I think history moves probably diagonally a lot of times as well, you know?

And I think this issue of literacy is a good example of what I'm trying to convey that we, to my mind, and I say this with great pain, I'm a writer, I'm a reader, this is my life, you know, there's no glee in what I'm saying at all, but it's not that we're going back to the dark ages.

We're going to some other place whose shape is very hard to imagine right now, but it will be extremely different.

And weirdly enough, the shapelessness of history makes me hopeful.

- For possibility?

- Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And freedom.

- It feels like the book really cares about freedom.

- Yes, it does.

It's at the very core of the novel.

I talked a little bit about freedom for myself as a writer and that I try to... It's a little weird because I work under extremely strict constraints that I set for myself for each project, but I do so freely, and I'm not genuflecting to any kind of tradition, or literary umpire, or taste, or spectral notions of the ideal reader or public.

No, I do feel very free as I'm writing, and all of the sort of contextual pressures fade away.

But in "Ply," I think in the novel as well, there is the freedom to create, which is all-important in the plot.

It is very much novel about artists, and I'm subsuming engineers and physicists within this category because they're doing it for the love of the thing.

It's not, again, going back to our very beginning of the conversation, there is nothing in it for anybody other than the hunger of discovery and the pleasure of the making.

So there is the freedom of art.

There is also this lovely, to my mind, lack of supervision in this world of "Ply" where everyone is free to do what they want.

And I think the unintended consequence, and I believe this to be true, is sort of a decline in crime.

And I think the more supervision and the more punitive a society is, the more crime there is as well.

I think that begets the very thing that it's trying to preclude.

So there is that freedom, but then, there is also, all-importantly, an ontological freedom, sort of our freedom to self-determination, our freedom to decide, our freedom to commit to forking paths, to one of the forks in those paths.

I think the book is very much about that.

It's about choice, and it's about the branchings of the future and our agency when it comes to that.

- Yeah, I mean, what feels provocative to me about it is kind of wrestling, as I'm reading it, with this idea of is this future, this stateless future, that feels to me like the end goal of a libertarian mindset almost, is this actually turning out to be a good thing or a bad thing?

And the impulse to want to know if it's definitively good or bad when in reality it seems like it's both.

- Yeah, just for the record, I am not a libertarian.

- Yeah, of course.

- I want that clearly expressed.

I do think that the state is a massively flawed institution, and there's no way it can't be, just because of its sheer size, and scope, and reach.

It's bound to fail, but we'll miss it when it's gone.

I can promise you that.

(Joe laughing) - Another thing that's so interesting about "Ply" to me is going into it in the first 10, 20 pages or so, I find myself clawing around for, is this a dystopic novel?

Is this a eutopic novel?

Is this a cyber punk?

What is this?

Trying to place a genre on it.

And I appreciated, as I kept reading, that it kind of, for me, refused to grab onto any of those definitions.

Do you have a definition for where the book is trying to place itself in?

- I am very grateful to not have a definition.

I think definitions are the enemy of art, of any kind of art.

I am very interested, as a writer, in genre, in inherited conventions, in the horizon of expectations they create for the writer.

That's what a genre is.

It's a causal system.

Some things are allowed to happen within the world of a fairy tale that are not allowed to happen in the world of crime fiction to give two very obvious examples, but that's what it is.

It's a causal horizon.

And how delightful is it to set one of those up, and then, completely destroy it?

I derive a perverse sense of joy by doing so, but I like playing with these commonplaces that have been hardened throughout history.

I think for too long now, at least for a century, science fiction has held a monopoly over the representation of science and technology in literature.

So this is a book that deals, to some extent, deals with other things too, but, to some extent, with science and technology, but it's not a science fiction book.

That is a very conscious gesture of planting little clues that will perhaps lead the reader into believing that this is a science fiction novel, but then, very clearly, it becomes something that is not quite that at all.

But you mentioned also the word dystopia in your question, and this is a word I take issue with because I think, at some point, we've lost the ability to imagine a better future for ourselves.

And I don't mean this needs to be, again, a sort of a saccharin version of some kind of utopia.

I'm not interested in that.

I think that would be a disrespectful thing to write, given the times we live in.

I tried to write about the end of a historical period and the beginning of a new one.

And I think the title, "Ply" has many plies, has many dimension, and has many ways in which you can read it.

One of them is that the novel takes place at a historical fold.

We are exiting this period that we're living in now, which we can call modernity, you know, and entering a new thing.

I'm not sure, and nobody in this world is sure about what that is, but I think what I wanted to come through in the novel is that this world is cracked, and fissured, and broken, but something is hatching through those cracks.

And this is one of my hopes for both the book and for ourselves that despite, you know, the hardships that we're living and that are in store for us and future generations, I think we're in the process of reinventing ourselves.

And this is something that I was hoping would come across in "Ply."

(inspiring electronic music) - As a writer, just on the craft side of this, how do you wrap your head around piecing all these different ideas together?

How would you describe that process for "Ply?"

- Everything that I write begins with reading.

I think that's the most important part of my process is just reading.

We were talking about selfhood and the inflation of the sense of self that is so pervasive, at least to my mind.

And I hope to have the humility, and I hope to show it on the page, to let everyone know that I understand, that, you know, I'm just in conversation with a long tradition that preexists me.

And I find it very suspicious when somebody writes as if that didn't exist, without engaging in that dialogue with literary history, because it's so beautiful.

Literature is the slowest moving conversation in the world, but it is a conversation.

You know, when you're reading Virgil, you are responding to Virgil.

So, again, it starts with a ton of reading, and reading that is pertinent to the vague, vaporous, dim project that I have in mind.

It's normally a feeling at this point.

There's no plot.

There's no characters.

And reading becomes note-taking.

When I talk about reading, it's like I wake up and I read all day, and then, I fall asleep reading, and then, I do the same thing next day.

It's all I do.

Like I'm reading, and that's it.

And, eventually, that becomes note-taking.

And, eventually, that becomes maybe little scenes, maybe ideas of who the people in the book will be, but mostly feelings, how I want things to feel.

And this is the thing that I try to preserve at all times in the book.

And then, at some point... The feeling, I mean.

And then at some point I'm off.

I start writing, and it's sentence by sentence.

I don't draft.

It's a mystery.

Like I don't understand what that even means.

I don't plot things.

I don't believe there is a platonic, ethereal idea of the novel that is wordless, that is outside of language, that is waiting to be incarnated in some kind of more or less contingent material manifestation.

No, I think literature exists only in language.

So, therefore, my book exists, whatever book that may be, as I write it sentence by sentence.

And these are not placeholders.

I put an enormous pressure in each sentence, and I don't move on to the next one until the one that I'm writing is kind of more or less okay.

It doesn't mean that it's done.

I'll go back and edit forever.

Conservatively, 75% of my workday, when I'm working on a novel, is editing the stuff that I already had.

And here comes the key part to me.

I am not a spontaneous kind of writer.

I'm not like a stream of consciousness, a free-flowing, automatic writing surrealist kind of person.

I'm very, very much about control of each sentence.

I would even go as far as to say I'm not a novelist.

I'm a writer of sentences.

And if I'm lucky, the sentences become a novel.

But what I'm interested in, way more than character, plot, anything, is the syntactical event, the beauty of a sentence.

And is this sentence doing more than one thing at the time?

Is it maybe even performing what it says semantically?

These are the things that are... Is it beautiful?

Is it full of heart?

But here is the job description as I see it for me, for myself, not for others, is that having this extreme degree of control while preserving the emotional core in the sentence, that is the hardest thing for me, to make things as beautiful, precise, lucid, clear, and sound as possible while also have them brim with emotion.

And this happens after each period, it begins anew.

- What was the emotion that drove "Ply?"

- For reasons that are unknown to me, I always write about two things that are paired up together.

They are loneliness, solitude, isolation, and disorientation, which I feel are intimately connected.

I think in utter isolation, all bearings are lost, right?

Because there's no frame of reference.

So these are two things that I keep coming back to, and they're more explicit in other books that I've written.

My first published book, which is called "In the Distance," is literally about a character who's alone for the entirety of the novel lost in the American West.

He doesn't know where north is.

So this is something that I'm drawn to.

I don't want to examine why, you know?

Now, after having read so much about quantum mechanics, I know that observing something inevitably affects it.

And I feel that if I look at this too much, I will break it.

It needs to be unknown to me why this is a driving force for me and for my writing.

And I feel that each project is my attempt at figuring that out, you know?

- It just makes me think about America again, because in a country that stresses individualism so much in its DNA, that feels like a lonely place to be in certain ways.

And, you know, "In the Distance," "Trust," and "Ply" could be seen as kind of a loose trilogy about America.

What keeps bringing you back to wanting to understand or explore America?

You know, you have international background.

- Yeah.

- What led you to America as the focus in that way?

- Well, I am an American by choice.

I'm a voluntary American, and I somehow feel that in these dark times, it's more important than ever to stand by that choice.

I feel it has a very modest, very private, surely political value just to, despite everything, keep embracing this choice that I've made.

I think it matters to me.

I am also mostly sort of a literary creature.

Like this is what I do with my life, with my days.

I don't have hobbies.

You know, I have a family.

That's the only other thing that I do.

And I became, as a teenager really, I became... I fell in love, is the correct expression, both with the English language in general and, very specifically, with the American canon.

The first novel I ever read in English in my early teens with the aid of an abridged, very bad dictionary, was "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," the only novel that Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote.

That was the first novel I read in its entirety in English.

And off I went, and it changed my life to the point that I moved here, you know?

And reading Melville, reading Henry James, reading the 19th century canon, Edith Wharton, moving on to the 20th century, was very important for me.

So I think a moment ago I said that I'm the kind of writer who writes facing tradition and in an overt conversation with that tradition, that the tradition that I'm interested in, not necessarily, you know, what's in academic syllabi or in Harold Bloom's "Western Canon," like my own canon.

So because I became so invested in my version of the American canon, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I also became invested in the United States because by addressing what I came to see, some of the highly ossified and crystallized tropes that have been present throughout, you know, the decades or centuries in this canon, by engaging those tropes, you are also, in a mediated fashion, engaging the historical conditions that gave rise to those very tropes, right?

So if I'm writing about a character lost in the West in the mid 19th century, there is no way around addressing the political, and economic, and historical determinations of that world.

And I rush toward them.

It's not that they're some kind of obstacle that I want to do away with.

I'm eager to understand them and, to the extent of my abilities, crack them open.

And I guess I've become very interested in the mythological dimension of American history.

I think having grown up in different countries, in different languages, and having been exposed to different cultures in a very serious way, like living fully in other countries, in my experience, I don't think there is another culture for which fiction plays such an important role than in the United States.

American history welcomes fiction.

It is eager to tell these tales about itself.

Some of them are completely horrific and involve, again, sort of the idea of a planetary vigilante and different versions of American exceptionalism.

Others are liberating, wonderful, and glorious in their egalitarianism, you know, from Whitman on, both ends of the spectrum.

But I don't think Ecuador or Belgium are doing things like this self-mythologizing.

I'm sure they're doing other things, but the extent to which the United States is eager to create these and promote these dreams about itself, these epics, these fantasies, to me, is a source of wonder and awe.

And I guess, more than American history, I'm writing more about that, about the ways in which the United States dreams about itself.

(inspiring music) - You know, I was trying to think of a good last question, but I think that's just such a beautiful note to end on.

I do appreciate that.

- All right.

- I think it does end it well, yeah.

Thank you so much for coming in.

- This was really one of the great ones because of you, not because of me.

Yeah, thank you guys.

- [Joe] I'm glad you had a good time.

Thanks.

That's our show.

A big thank you to Hernan Diaz for taking the time to talk.

"American Masters: Creative Spark" is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you.

This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner.

Our executive producer is Michael Kantor.

Original music is composed by Hannis Brown.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Evan Joseph.

Funding for "American Masters: Creative Spark" is provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, the Anderson Family Charitable Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Churina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, and by PBS viewers like you.

Thanks.

See you soon.

(inspiring music continues)