Richard Powers’ latest novel, Playground, has a choose-your-own-genre feel to it. Want a straight-forward romantic comedy? He offers two meant for-each-other leads who suffer through an insurmountable split, then re-unite. Or maybe tragic rom-com…another pair, best friends from youth, suffer a falling out only to finally re-engage after one has lost his mental faculties, his whole personhood. How about a lyrical journey through the ocean’s depths, visited by a woman who spends her life visiting underwater Edens, allowing Powers to rhapsodize about the mysteries therein.
But wait! He weaves in the story of an early fictional social media behemoth, which grows to monstrous proportions by gamifying the interactions among its multi-billion-strong user base. As if that’s not enough, he suggests that its increasing reliance on deep-learning artificial intelligence might result in human resurrection – literally, the recreation of the physical being, consciousness, and memory of any and everyone who’s ever lived.
All of this floats around a straight-forward story of a tiny (population: 80) Pacific isle which finds itself facing a recurrent nightmare. Unknown investors intend to use the decaying ports and other facilities left over from phosphate mining which decimated the island in the 19th and 20th centuries. They plan on building floating cities, launching them from Makatea into open waters, free at last from any governmental regulation or economic parasitism. The islanders are given the option to vote on that prospect. It is the resulting discussion which serves as the scaffolding of all of Powers’ other concerns.
Two narrators appear. One, first-person, is Todd Keane, the creator of that social media platform, “Playground”. He dictates his part of the story to the AI machine he has created. Through him, we learn about his youthful friendship with Rafi Young, founded on their love of games, specifically chess, then Go. Todd is a child of privilege from Evanston just north of Chicago. His father is a manic financier who offered little love to Todd, his sister, and mother. Rafi’s own father, separated from his mother when Rafi was five, has drilled him playing games just as Todd’s did. Donald Young wants to ensure his son, who lives in the black ghettos of South Chicago, will be strong and secure, able to work twice as hard and be twice as tough as any white man.
Despite that attempt, Rafi grows up to be a literary academic, endlessly perfecting his thesis on 19th century poets. He and Todd remain close through their Jesuit high school, and the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. While in college, they meet, and Rafi falls in love with, Ina Aroita. Daughter of an Hawaiian father and Tahitian mother, she grows up in Honolulu, and ventures to U of I after high school. There, she is fascinated by her first sight of snow, and develops her artistic talent of taking found objects, melding them together, and letting them speak for her.
Their three stories are told at times by Todd, and at times by an omniscient narrator with whom his musings and reminiscences alternate. Also in that narration, we follow the on-going story of Makatea’s community, which includes Eveline Beaulieu. We meet Evie first as a twelve-year old French-Canadian girl whose father has thrown her into the deep end of a swimming pool, forty pounds of underwater breathing apparatus attached to her back. She survives that, demonstrating the practicality of the technology which Jacques Cousteau and others would use to open the door to all that lies below. Her story only tangentially connects to the other three. At age 92, she finds herself, along with Ina and Rafi, as a new arrival on that tiny atoll about to be overwhelmed by the 21st century.
Powers does eventually bring all this together, but the structure seems a bit creaky, an overly complicated way of merging all his ideas and characters. And in the end, it’s not clear there is a unity to his purpose.
But along the way, his writing is sparkling. Each character reveals an inner and outer complexity, appearing completely whole. His descriptions of the early internet, the explosive and dangerous growth of monetized social media, and the veiled musings of current day artificial intelligence are captivating. Even more mesmerizing are the trips Eveline takes into the hidden world below the ocean surface, Creatures unimaginable come alive for us. We see dancing lights on the skin of a cuttle-fish and are fascinated by the continuing relationship between Evie and a manta ray trapped in fishing line.
Powers takes care with every person we meet. The unwilling mayor of the island struggles to bring meetings to order. The elderly “Queen” of the island communicates by dance and song. Even a hermit seems worthy of attention. Indeed, the most affecting moment of the book might be the death of a minor character from cancer.
Even though I enjoyed this book and was drawn more and more quickly into the overlapping stories, I couldn’t help but feel that Powers’ editor was afraid to tell the Pulitzer Prize winner, “Richard, decide what you are really trying to tell us here, and hone in on that.”