In his 14th novel, which was longlistedfor the Booker Prize, Richard Powers continues to explore the impact of science and technology on humanity. Powers has been admired for his novels of ideas since the 1980s, including the 2006 National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker. But it was his runaway bestseller about deforestation, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory, that made him a household name. The epic novel was followed by Bewilderment (2021), which tackled neurodiversity, Artificial Intelligence and climate change. In Playground, Powers carries on with the theme of ecology, trying to do for oceans what The Overstory did for trees, as well as diving deeper into AI.
Playground centres on four main characters. Todd Keane is the billionaire founder of a social media platform predating Facebook and Reddit that gamifies engagement. Now the company is turning its attention to AI: “The Age of Humans was coming to an end,” Todd recounts. “I was helping to build the next big way of being.” Recently diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies at the age of 57, he is racing to complete his life’s work, which involves telling his story to a “you” who turns out to be AI.
Most of Todd’s memories, set off in italics, involve his best friend from high school, Rafi Young. Rafi is a Black “lit-nerd” with a scholarship to their elite Chicago prep school. The boys compete in chess and Go, and later bond over grief. They fall out at university in an argument involving Rafi’s girlfriend, Ina Aroita. Years later, Rafi, a schoolteacher, and Ina, an artist, live on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, population 82, with their two adopted children. Todd, meanwhile, has remained single and childless.
Braided into the trio’s narratives is the story of Evelyne Beaulieu, a French-Canadian oceanographer who breaks the glass ceiling in marine biology and lobbies for conservation. At 92, she laments that she has witnessed “the largest part of the planet exhausted, before it was ever explored”. Evie first fell in love with the ocean at 12, when her father strapped her to a prototype of an aqualung. She remains more at home at sea than on land and writes a bestselling book, Clearly It Is Ocean, to explain her passion to her children.
The paths of the main characters eventually cross on Makatea, as its residents prepare to vote on a proposed “seasteading” investment. A mysterious consortium of tech bros hopes to use the atoll as a base to build a floating city, free of national regulations and taxes. “Apparently it’s called libertarianism,” the mayor explains. The islanders in favour of the project cite its economic benefits; those against it fear environmental consequences and the risks of “eternal colonialism”. AI is on hand to answer their questions.
Simulated brains are a recurring theme in Powers’s work. In Galatea 2.2 (1995), a writer feeds books to a neural network to see if it can appraise literature; Plowing the Dark (2000) featured virtual reality. Just as in Bewilderment, in which a boy interacts with his deceased mother through an “empathy machine”, Rafi, inspired by the philosophy of the “common task” of Nikolai Fyodorov, fantasises about finding a way to resurrect the dead. “I had this sense that we were living through this ethical moment again,” Powers, who worked as a computer programmer before turning to fiction, has said of his inspiration for the novel.
As AI expands exponentially and ocean temperatures rise, the themes of Playground are undoubtedly timely. The seascapes, as seen through Evie’s awe, are rendered evocatively. But descriptions of cuttlefish alone do not a novel make. In response to some criticism of his early work as too brainy, Powers may have overcorrected. “Always write for your top 5 per cent of readers,” Martin Amis once counselled. Powers seems to be catering to the book-buying masses instead. Given the importance of his ecological message, it’s fair enough to seek a broader appeal, but we haven’t received any improvements in novelistic skills, such as characterisation and dialogue, in return. A twist visible from a nautical mile away fails to keep the plot afloat.
In a recent New Yorker profile, Powers asked the interviewer if Playground had made him cry. Literary novels can still move us to tears of course (one is advised to embark on Alan Hollinghurst’s forthcoming novel Our Evenings with a box of tissues to hand). But like Todd, who admits to being puzzled by people, and the AI, which has only “learned the game of being human”, Playground doesn’t plumb the depths of human emotion. It is likely, as such, to leave readers’ eyes dry.
- Mia Levitin is a freelance critic
