Playground by Richard Powers

W.W. Norton, 400 pp.

By Wendy Smith

Soaringly imaginative yet firmly grounded in the real world, unabashedly intellectual but deeply felt, Richard Powers’ fiction deals with the most pressing issues of our time in the most wrenchingly human terms. His magnificent new book, Playground, is no exception; through the monologue of a dying tech mogul, we see the birth and explosive growth of the virtual world and AI, the glory and fragility of the natural world, and the painful complexities of relationships shaped by race, class, and family dysfunction. A computer whiz, an oceanographer, a poet, and an artist take different paths through life in Powers’ intricately braided narrative, but their destinies are linked.

The Polynesian creation myth retold in the opening pages establishes several of Powers’ primary themes. “Now that the world was sparked with branching and unfolding life,” the creator god Ta’aroa decides, “it was time for Ta’aroa to finish his game.” So he creates people—“someone to play with at last”—and watches as they make discoveries and new inventions, “just as Ta’aroa had made the world.” This world has multiple layers, and humans begin filling each of them and climbing to the next. In the myth, “each new layer still belonged to Ta’aroa,” and the universe remains guided by a benign force, but in Playground the discovery of new horizons brings radical change with consequences that are not necessarily benign. As always, Powers is amazed by human creativity and appalled by the careless ways it’s deployed.

Todd Keane knows about consequences, unintended and otherwise. As his first-person narrative begins in the year 2027, the 57-year-old tells us, “One of my former companies is on the verge of announcing a breakthrough that will rush an unsuspecting humankind into its fourth and perhaps final act.” Todd is insanely rich thanks to Playground, the social media platform he created that now has one billion users, but he has just been diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies, a degenerative disease that will slowly destroy his cognitive and physical abilities. He begins to look back over his past, while third-person passages chronicle the life of Evelyne Beaulieu, whose book about the ocean inspired 10-year-old Todd, and a dilemma faced on the Pacific island of Makatea, where Todd’s oldest friend, Rafi Young, and his wife, Ina Aroita, live with their two children.

Makatea, a mountainous atoll in French Polynesia, hears that a group of American venture capitalists wants to use it as the staging ground for their “seasteading” project, the creation of floating cities in international waters, free from any government’s laws. The Americans promise jobs and money to construct badly needed infrastructure, but Makatea has already been exploited and trashed once, by phosphate mining; the fertilizer it produced dramatically improved crop yields across the globe, but by the time the mines shut in 1966 one-third of Makatea was “a moonscape of jagged rock pitted with cavities several feet wide and a hundred feet deep.” (As usual, Powers’ depiction of nature despoiled is fact-based.) The island’s mayor has wrung a promise from the French Polynesian government that the project will not proceed unless Makatea’s 82 inhabitants vote to allow it. In addition to Rafi and Ina, the current population includes 92-year-old Evelyne Beaulieu.

How these three outsiders ended up on Makatea will become clear much later. First, we learn about the childhoods of Todd and Rafi, two brilliant boys from unhappy families. Todd is the son of a wealthy pit trader at the Chicago Board of Trade; he takes refuge from his parents’ screaming quarrels (and noisy makeup sex) by picturing himself walking across the bottom of Lake Michigan. He vows to dedicate his life to oceanography after reading Evelyne Beaulieu’s book, Clearly It Is Ocean, but the gift of a primitive computer for his 11th birthday takes him in a different direction.

Rafi is the son of a Chicago fireman who relentlessly pushes him to excel in school because, “A black man’s gotta read twice as good as any white, just to get half the recognition…A black man had to be faster, stronger, and shrewder, too, just to get by.” Living up to his father’s expectations means entering a privileged, mostly white world that Rafi distrusts, even though it gives him access to opportunities he relishes. The boys meet at Saint Ignatius College Prep, bond over games of chess and Go, and embark on an intense, competitive friendship that takes them through high school to the University of Illinois at Urbana. Todd is there for the outstanding computer science program; Rafi, steeped in literature and beginning to write creatively, for the 12-million-volume library.

The third story arc follows Evelyne as she overcomes sexism to become the first woman accepted by Duke University’s ocean studies department, in 1953, and goes on to become a preeminent researcher and diver who spends more time underwater than with her husband and two children. Through Evelyne’s eyes, Powers invites us to experience nature’s spectacular diversity and inventiveness. His gorgeous, lyrical descriptions of the world she encounters beneath the ocean’s surface culminate in an extraordinary passage in which Evelyne encounters a giant cuttlefish pulsing colors across his skin in elaborate, enigmatic patterns. Then:

The light-slinger seized up, contracting his body into a rigid mass. Still without any audience but the open water, the singer started dancing. His arms pinwheeled, then drew in. They stabbed out in opposing directions, like some choreographed move by Martha Graham. . . . The cuttlefish was putting on a play,

“Play” and “playground” are words that reverberate through Powers’ text in multiple contexts. Todd and Rafi both excel in game play, and their different approaches reveal who they are. When Rafi asks him why Go is “the most beautiful thing in the word,” Todd replies, “It’s the logic. Actions and patterns and deterministic consequences.” On the contrary, argues Rafi, “It’s drama…Each of these dudes [the game pieces] has a personality. They each have a history. They’re all on a path.” Todd sees patterns to be decoded; Rafi sees individuals to be understood.

Yet Rafi resists being entirely understood himself; he shares more of his family history and feelings with Todd than with anyone else, but he also makes it clear there are things about his life this advantaged white boy can never share In their senior year, Ina arrives at the university’s School of Art, and she and Rafi fall in love. Like Rafi, she has moved into a world beyond the scope of her parents, a U.S. naval officer and a former hotel chambermaid “from the Tahitian underclass.” Like him, she explores her losses in art: sculpture in her case, poetry in his. Together, they speak a “secret fine arts language” that baffles Todd, who moves in a universe defined by the burgeoning capabilities of the computer. He feels slightly left out (and slightly in love with Ina himself), but he’s happy for his friend, who seems “a whole new person—nimble, witty, vulnerable, open….The three of us, together, became invincible.”

Passing references in the Makatea passages hint that Rafi found Ina in Polynesia years after a crisis in Chicago that broke up the couple and estranged them from Todd. Todd’s account of brutal confrontation comes as a grimly ironic climax to his recollections of Playground’s development and wildly successful launch (related with Powers’ usual in-depth knowledge of computers and the Internet). From there, we watch Todd evolve into a now-familiar example of the tech gazillionaire—self-servingly libertarian, indifferent to the social and psychological impact of his technology—while we listen to the inhabitants of Makatea debate the seasteading offer. We also continue to follow Evelyne Beaulieu through her life before she came to Makatea. Powers’ tender, nuanced portrait of her marriage makes palpable the hurt that her overriding passion for the ocean inflicts on her husband, but also the profound loyalty and love that bind them.

As the individual plot lines advance in tandem, some odd discrepancies crop up. What aren’t we being told? And who is the mysterious “you” Todd periodically addresses? One of the many pleasures in reading Playground is the satisfaction of seeing how brilliantly Powers draws three apparently distinct narrative strands towards each other, deftly planting clues along the way to a jaw-dropping climactic revelation. Only then do we completely grasp the grandeur and depth of Powers’ achievement. Exploring some of humanity’s worst fears about technology, he affirms in the beautiful, heartbreaking final scenes the power of art, significantly aided by technology, to heal the world—sometimes. Is the determinedly hopeful glimpse into Makatea’s future at the end of this extraordinary novel visionary, or delusional? We can’t know, and Powers leaves us with a Zen-like koan: “Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation.”

Wendy Smith is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for excellence in reviewing.