Playground

By Richard Powers

WW Norton, 2024

I’ve read all of Richard Powers’ fourteen novels and have reviewed many of them since his second, Prisoner’s Dilemma in 1988. I mention these facts to support my contention that Powers is now—with Morrison gone, Pynchon gone soft, and DeLillo silent—the greatest living American novelist. If his new novel, Playground, is not one of his very best, it’s a pleasurable and prescient assemblage of his Greatest Hits—scientific themes, prodigy characters, global dangers, linguistic ingenuity, literary gamesmanship.

Playing literary games is not usually the first-mentioned characteristic of Powers’ fiction, but Prisoner’s Dilemma was rooted in 1950s game theory. One of the significant characters in Powers’ Pulitzer-winning The Overstory (which is one of his very best) is a computer game inventor. One of the four major characters in Playground, Todd Keane, is the billionaire creator of the Internet site that gives the novel its title. Only at the end of The Gold Bug Variations (another of Powers’ very best) do we discover who have been narrating the whole story. At the end of Playground, we find that all three seemingly separate strands of narration have been created by Keane’s DeepDive AI that uses his private anecdotes and public information to construct what he—or it--calls a “rich, robust, and convincing story” but one with a counter-factual happy ending. You may feel I’m inflicting a spoiler with this information, but I think of it as a helper because many of the early readers of Playground were confused, even at the end, by the novel’s narrative game.

Keane and his long-time, then estranged friend, Rafi Young played chess against each other as kids, then move up to the more complex Go as college students in the late 1980s at the University of Illinois where Keane studies programming and Young tries to be a poet. He says AI will never be able to write poems, but Powers suggests that AI may be able to write a novel. Or maybe Powers--in this novel where all living beings including fish play—is playing with or against his readers. Yes, Playground claims to have been composed by Artificial Intelligence, but we know—don’t we?--that it was written by the natural—but almost preternatural—intelligence of Richard Powers.

Powers’ knowledge of various sciences is usually the first-remarked quality of his fiction. The Gold Bug Variations had as its subject and its form recombinant DNA. The Overstory was about the complex collaborative systems of forests. The science in Playground is oceanography, and as in The Overstory Powers introduces a female character—a generation older than Keane, Young, and the Tahitian woman, Ina Aroita, whom both men love—to provide oceanographic information and dive experience. Powers puts into Evelyne Beaulieu’s mouth the wonders of the deep—and the threat of polluted oceans to life on dry land. Powers lives on a Tennessee mountain, but the detailed enthusiasms he gives to Beaulieu are a remarkable combination of research and invention. In this novel’s vision, land is like chess and the oceans are like a gigantic Go board of play beyond current human understanding, even that of AI.

Despite its high-flying games and deep-diving science, Playground is grounded in two somewhat traditional plots. At the university, the sculptor Ina falls in love with and lives with Rafi, which leads the two childhood friends to be estranged. Decades later, Ina and Rafi have adopted two children and are living on Makatea, a Polynesian island with 78 other inhabitants. Once ravished by phosphate mining, Makatea is now threatened by a certain tech billionaire’s desire to use the island as a jumping off point for the construction of floating cities. This late connection between the three former friends may have seemed “convincing” to Keane’s AI, but readers could find Powers’ resolution of the marriage plot and the environmental plot not as plausible as the AI might think. This would be unfortunate because the village life of the island is presented with authoritative anthropological expertise—and humor, not a hallmark of Powers’ fiction.

Powers knows Rafi’s literary language, employs Todd’s computing jargon, and describes the silent language of Ina’s sculptures. Then there are mixed dialects of the inhabitants of Makatea. In The Overstory, trees have a language, a way of communicating to each other. The same is true of many of the fish described in Playground. Influenced by Huizinga’s Homo Ludenz, a classic study of play in human culture, Powers suggests that everywhere life is playing what Wittgenstein called “language games.” Powers would have humans see and feel this connection with non-human communication systems, possibly a basis for humans’ new respect for and protection of the natural world. In The Overstory, Powers referred to James Lovelock’s Gaia that posited Earth as living. In Playground, the planet is speaking.

I have in another review of Powers called him a soteriological writer, one who would have his fiction save lives. Keane is dying, the heroic scientist of The Gold Bug Variations is dying, the protagonist of Gain, yet another of Powers greatest novels, is dying. Fiction can’t save them, but their deaths point to systemic causes. Forests and seas are dying. I think Powers believes that the right kind of stories—global in scale, personal in empathy--can retard the deaths of nature. Powers is no cheap catastrophist; the sciences he knows tell him how contingent humans have made all life. Perhaps he plays narrative and formal games to balance his earnest pessimism, or plays to draw readers into his diagnoses of contemporary ills. The conflict between Powers’ seriousness and his play is present throughout Playground in Rafi’s desire for moral justice and Todd’s passion for free invention. I won’t reveal how the conflict is resolved by the AI or the novelist.

Readers less familiar than I am with Powers’ novels may well be as ravished by the reach and astonishments of oceanic Playground as were many readers of the tree-loving The Overstory. But I found Playground more a combinatorial game—Greatest Hits--than a site of new, free, imaginative play. Is it fair to expect America’s greatest living novelist to, at the age of 67, create a fiction one would not recognize as a Powers production? Perhaps not. Playground is an impressive and warm-hearted book. Maybe only I want more or different play from Richard Powers.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels, four critical books, and hundreds of reviews and essays in American periodicals.