Hernan Diaz’s latest conjures a gritty, post-tech future as bleak as anything in Dickens –

“Ply” unfolds in a city whose geography resembles New York. Democracy has collapsed, the environment has been degraded, the streets are unpoliced, and private firms have monopolies on security and electricity distribution. Birth rates have plummeted, people die because of a lack of basic medications and accessible healthcare, and buildings are dilapidated, abandoned, or inhabited by strange and often threatening groups.

Yet even in this bleak landscape, those on the fringes can carve out a life with meaning, transport, and joy. Underground music shows abound, especially in “parts of the city that had fallen into complete oblivion,” communal living and impromptu family arrangements are the norm, and many citizens find a sense of gritty yet glorious freedom in evading corporate control and forging unexpected bonds. Passages could come straight out of a memoir by Patti Smith: “It was beautiful, but we were filled with a happy disdain for beauty. It was wild, but we were invulnerable. It was short-lived, but while it lasted, it was a long, pure now.”

The first half of “Ply” is narrated by an unnamed young woman whose voice is so fresh, vulnerable, and searching that we are immediately invested. Her father, a book-store owner, disappeared in “the Suppression,” her mother, a “tinker” who repurposed and fixed old objects and devices, died when she was eleven. She is incorporated into other “families,” including a cultish group where she and other young women shave their heads and wear gray robes in the service of a charismatic tinker. Eventually, she falls in love with a fellow apprentice, and the two girls run off to become “pinchers,” stealing electricity from the grid, using it to charge “bricks” (portable batteries), and selling them on the black market.

The publisher describes “Ply” as Dickensian; it merits that epithet for several reasons. The dilapidation of the human world is pure noxious urban Victoriana. The opening of “Bleak House,” with its universal oppression of mud, smoke, soot, and fog, backgrounds the pervasively polluted landscape of “Ply.” The narrator’s declaration, “the river is where we dispose of our dead,” reverberates with the dead bodies being dredged up in the opening scene of “Our Mutual Friend.” Architectural dereliction and cramped, unsanitary living conditions are a futuristic facsimile of the slum Tom-All-Alone’s in “Bleak House,” luxurious buildings in collapse, overcome by “neglect and decay…covered in dust and cobwebs,” recall Miss Havisham’s crumbling Satis House. But most of all, the idea of a vulnerable, valuable orphan adrift in a relentlessly cruel world and stratified society, grasping for something to hold onto, searching for family and belonging, connects the Victorian and twenty-first-century authors. Our orphaned pincher takes her place alongside scrappy Oliver Twist, who like her joins a gang of criminals to make his way in the world. Rebellious, intelligent, a seeker, and a survivor, our pincher is a punk Pip, a plucky Copperfield. Dickens’s children must grow up too soon and work too young; their talents and virtues are often exploited in the service of others’ goals and projects. So too, our pincher.

While “Ply”’s first half alternates between the pincher’s present-day activities and her backstory, the second half shifts both stylistically and plotwise: first person narration gives way to third, and the plot narrows to a grandiose scientific quest. The pincher is enlisted by Pola, a megalomaniacal scientist with an “insanely ambitious goal” and a drug problem, to work with her on “a discovery that will alter the fabric of reality itself.” The story fills with long disquisitions on particle physics and descriptions of the women’s painstaking work. Although I understood the epistemological and ethical points Diaz was making with these shifts, I felt a sense of loss. After the uncanny and vibrantly imagined world of “Ply,” after the fresh and vital voice of the pincher, the novel’s second half felt disappointing and the playing with pronouns and tenses a bit gimmicky.

Yet pleasures still appear. From “an outlandish theory backed by a freakish contraption,” Pola’s vision acquires structure, allies, and galvanizing consequences. Diaz explores parallels between science and music as means of knowing, “way[s] of peeling back the world to discover the true being of things,” and shows how “this pursuit of the ineffable go[es] against every instrumental, utilitarian, mercantile impulse.”

Listening to transporting music, the pincher releases her pervasive sense of dread: “The joy of the present dispelled the darkness of imagined futures.” She tells Pola: “What I care for, what moves me, is someone touching the edges of the utterable and trying to push through them…I am interested in hearing someone, despite every obstacle, try to emerge.” No doubt “Ply”’s protagonist and author are both such someones. Together they make a testament to the surpassing importance of the human voice, artistic fecundity, improvisation, and ingenuity.

Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College and the author of “The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy” and “The Critic’s Daughter.”

Ply

By Hernan Diaz

Riverheard, 464 pages, $32