Review: Playground, by Richard Powers

Richard Powers has spent thirty years writing one novel over and over, and I mean that as description, not complaint: a novel in which some vast, slow, systemic thing — genetics, music, capitalism, trees — is revealed to be the actual protagonist of lives that believed they were private. In The Overstory the system was forest. In Playground, it is ocean, with computation running alongside like a shadow twin, and the two of them together ask the question Powers has been circling his whole career: what do we owe the systems that made us, once we’ve built systems of our own?

The novel braids four lives. Evie Beaulieu, a pioneering diver who fell in love with the sea as a girl strapped into one of the first aqualungs, and whose life becomes a long apprenticeship to the reef. Ina Aroita, an artist raised across Pacific naval bases, making sculpture from what the ocean returns. And two Chicago boys — Rafi Young and Todd Keane, one Black and bookish, one white and rich and possessed by code — whose friendship, built across a chessboard and then a Go board, curdles over decades into the novel’s deepest wound. Keane grows up to found a Facebook-scale social platform and, eventually, to narrate the book from inside a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, addressing his lost friend across a silence years wide. Their stories converge on Makatea, a French Polynesian island already strip-mined once for phosphate, now courted by a consortium that wants to use it as a staging ground for seasteading — floating cities, the ocean as the next frontier for the same appetite that ate the island’s interior a century ago.

The ocean writing is the best Powers has ever done, and I say that having admired the trees. The reef passages — Evie at ninety, still diving, greeting a manta like a colleague — have the quality the nature writers call attention and the theologians call prayer: description so sustained it becomes moral argument. Powers writes coral the way other novelists write childhood, as the lost world that made everything after it legible, and the book’s ecological grief is earned page by page rather than asserted. A marine biologist could quibble the details; a marine biologist commenting on this blog once forgave a novelist 15 percent for the sake of the other 85, and the ratio here is at least that favorable.

The computation half is riskier, and here the book divides its readers — including the two readers who live in my own head and argued through the final hundred pages. The late plot turns on Keane’s AI, a system called Profunda, and on a referendum in which Makatea’s eighty-two voters must decide the island’s future. To say more would spoil the novel’s one genuine structural shock, a late reframing that made me put the book down and stare out the window, recalculating everything I had read — the most Powers move in a career of them: the reveal that the system was the protagonist after all. What I can say is that the machinery of the twist involves the same technology currently offering to summarize, simulate, and console us, and that Powers is neither a booster nor a doomer about it. He is something rarer and more unsettling: a novelist who takes seriously the possibility that our new systems might extend our oldest longings — for play, for connection, for the friend we lost — while quietly replacing the world in which those longings could be answered.

Playground is not flawless. The four strands pull unevenly; Ina, in particular, deserves more novel than she gets, and Powers still writes dialogue as though people speak in edited essays (they don’t; I’ve checked; this blog notwithstanding). But the flaws are the flaws of scale, the cracks in a building that is genuinely trying to hold too much — the Pacific, the internet, a broken friendship, the end of a mind — and I will take an overloaded cathedral over a well-made shed every time I’m offered the choice. What stays, weeks later, is the drowned light of it: Evie’s reef, Keane’s dissolving memory, the island twice offered up to other people’s futures. The ocean covers most of the planet and most of this novel, and Powers’s wager is that we cannot keep treating either — the sea, the self — as a playground with someone else responsible for closing time. The wager lands. The book closes; the water doesn’t.