Review by Peter Reason
I am a fan of Richard Powers. I read The Overstory four times, appreciating how the writing draws together an animist worldview with ecological activism while also engaging the reader in the lives of the human protagonists. I was fascinated both with the story, its place within ecological literature, and how Powers put it together. I appreciated Bewilderment for its links between cosmology, neurodivergence, and authoritarian control and for the question posed on the hardback flysheet, which haunts me as a grandfather, “How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperilled planet?”
Richard Powers’ novels go to the heart of complex, contemporary issues. The book draws on his extensive research into fundamentally divergent topics – Playground encompasses (at least) the micro-politics of race and gender, the ecology of the oceans, neo-colonialism, gender and race relations, and the accelerating development of social media and artificial intelligence. The novel interweaves several narratives, moving from one story to another quite abruptly, drawn together with sufficient pace to keep readers engaged, and with more than enough ambiguity to keep them pondering what they are reading. I feel I’m present in each conversation, each piece of lovemaking, each each argument, each attempt to make up.
Given this complexity and ambiguity, I have wondered how to write a review which tells readers something of what Playground is ‘about’. I notice that several of the reviews in the mainstream press attempt to give a narrative summary, and I was reminded of a story told about the Canadian poet and singer, Leonard Cohen. He is said to have read a poem on a radio show. Once he had finished, the presenter asked him what the poem was about. Cohen paused for a long time, then returned to the beginning and read the entire poem through a second time. Playground feels just like this. If you have to ask what it is about, you have in some sense missed the point.
I have decided that the best overview to offer is provided by Powers himself on his website. After all, he and his publishers will have sweated over exactly what to write:
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers… Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
I imagine Powers and his publicity team carefully crafting this summary, obsessing over the precise wording. It appears to tell us about the book while giving very little away. Look at the title, Playground, it doesn’t mention any of these four human lives, nor the places where their lives unfold; it doesn’t even mention the Ocean, its beauty and degradation, which is another significant theme throughout the book.
You can consult Google to find more about this ‘startling AI breakthrough’, but I warn you, DON’T! Not even after finishing the book and putting in back in your bookshelf. I would go so far as to say that even knowing that there is a ‘startling breakthough’ to some extent deprives the reader of some of the enigma this book portrays. To describe the surprise ending as an ‘AI breakthrough’ implies that we can clearly grasp what is happening in the book. But surely, part of the point is that we cannot grasp current times from a singular perspective.
The extraordinary complexity of our time may be beyond the capacity of intelligent apes. Too much clarity will blind the reader and obscure the deeper perspectives on offer. Much better, post-reading, to allow the interaction of the themes to percolate through your mind, to form new connections, to further illuminate this interpenetration of narrative: human histories, ecological beauty and destruction, the acceleration of AI.
However, even though this book is not only (or even) about the human protagonists, nevertheless they are all compellingly portrayed. We read about each from troubled childhood through to middle age and beyond, even to the point of death. There is great pleasure to be had in reading these stories. I found the relationship between Todd and Rafi particularly compelling. They are both growing up with powerful yet dysfunctional fathers, bond over chess and Go at an elite high school. Their relationship – between an intense, poetic Black kid and a privileged white bro – a self-described ‘soldier for the digital revolution’ – has all the competitive intimacy of many male relationships with the added twist of racial hyper-sensitivity. As Todd puts it, ‘our relationship was built on play’; maybe a hint of the homoerotic too. In the end these tensions blow their relationship apart, yet their attachment continues to haunt them both.
In contrast, Evie is a shy and anxious child whose life is transformed when her father drops her into a pool with an early aqualung; lying at the bottom of the pool, learning to breath, is transformative: she finds her place in the world. She works her way to the very peak of oceanography in the face of institutionalized male prejudice and outright opposition. And she falls deeply in love with Ocean, is most comfortable under water and with underwater creatures, willing to neglect her husband and family for her passionate professional life. Her narrative introduces us to the wonders of the deep ocean and to the unspeakable tragedy of its degradation by human carelessness and exploitation. Evie reflects:
She had grown old, older than half the world’s current countries. She has seen the collapse of the infinite fisheries of the Grand Banks, observed the disappearance of snow crabs from the Bering Sea, watched miles-wide drag nets dredge up in one afternoon coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow… She had lived to see trash at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the remotest places on earth turned into resorts, the Gulf Stream wavering,… Nine-tenths of large life missing, and the rest filled with heavy metals. The largest part of the planet exhausted, before it was ever explored…
The theme of Ocean draws us into a second major narrative which takes place on the Pacific island of Makatea. It’s a place historically devastated by phosphate mining, with its fragile ecology and close-knit community now threatened with re-colonization: American libertarian tech bros seek to build a factory to manufacture modular floating city parts for the purpose of ‘seasteading’, the creation of floating communities on the high seas independent of national and international law.
Of the four primary human protagonists, artist Ina is less compellingly portrayed, but the many secondary characters – the fathers of Todd, Rafi and Evie; Bart, Evie’s long-suffering husband; Didier, the mayor of Makatea; Wai Temauri, boat pilot and diver; the eccentric Queen; and indeed the whole community of the island, are each shown with their particular history and perspective. Just a line brings a character to life:
She had never known another human being who more badly needed the world to be perfect and who felt its shortfall more bitterly. There was something heroic, almost artistic, about that need.
So read this book. Allow yourself to be drawn in. Appreciate the connections hinted at throughout. Sit with unknowing and ambiguity. This novel has much to teach us about the complexity of our times. It will excite some and make others’ blood freeze.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He also edits Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Richard Powers, Playground (Penguin, 2025). 978-1804950821, 400pp., paperback.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK+ P&P)
