A novel for our time.
People read novels for different reasons. Probably most read for a good story. We read some novels for the beauty of their language (Think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead) or to learn something new, or experience vicariously what we would never experience in our own lives. We also read novels to expand our world. It’s rare to find one novel that can do all this, but Richard Powers’ amazing Playground does just that, and more.
Author of the 2018 Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory, Powers tells interlocking stories of four people over a half century. Todd Keane is on the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence (“I was helping to build the next big way of being.”) He shares a close and competitive relationship with best friend Rafi Young, for whom life is decanted through literature. Both are in love with Ina Aroita, who finds her meaning through art. Meanwhile, ninety-something Evie Beaulieu, whose father developed the first aqualung, has found life most fulfilling in the ocean. Together, these characters’ lives embody the novel’s main themes.
Powers’ story is as capacious as the Pacific which Evie spends her life exploring. Through his exquisite prose, we share her exhilaration in the watery underworld, amid its abundant life. He makes an argument that our planet should be called Ocean rather than Earth. (“Ninety percent of the biosphere is underwater!”) We terrestrials are in the minority.
Through Evie’s eyes, too, we see the continuing degradation of the planet and the impact of the resulting climate change. In 1896, “the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.” 1896? We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Along with environmental concerns, Powers brings us into the world of today’s “techno-utopians,” showing both AI’s promise and its peril. (“We were putting the future on autopilot.”)
Powers, a computer scientist by training, displays a vast encyclopedic grasp of the latest technology, of the natural and social sciences, of philosophy, history, globalization, yet he is also capable of conveying moments of transcendent vision, filled with awe and wonder. (“Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.”)
This is a book for our time. In a nutshell, it’s about “machine intelligence and human ignorance.”
He offers no easy answers. Facing the challenge of planetary catastrophe, one longs for hope, even amid the growing truth of the biosphere’s slow killing. Like Evie, we may find that “hope and truth could not be reconciled.”
The earth is 4 billion years old. Homo sapiens has been around only 300,000. Taking the long view, there may be hope for life on earth. It just might not include humanity.
Halfway through the twentieth century, in a cold northern city on the other side of the globe from Makatea, a father threw his weighted-down twelve-year-old daughter into the water, hoping she would sink to the bottom. Forty pounds of metal pulled the girl downward. Twisting in animal dread, she looked from the world she’d fallen into back up into the world she came from. Through the shimmering layer in between, the girl saw the quicksilver outline of her father stabbing a finger toward his own face and mouthing, Tu n’as qu’à respire. All you need to do is breathe.
from Playground
Richard Powers
W.W. Norton & Co.
This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (February 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.
