The wonders of the ocean and the terrors of A.I. meet in a Richard Powers’s new novel, which considers the future of an environmentally challenged Polynesian island.
PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers
The ecological novel has become a staple of contemporary fiction, and rightly so. When people aren’t really listening to the drumbeat of scientists, it’s essential that our best authors take up their sticks as well. Heck, bang a cymbal.
Richard Powers was writing about nuclear radiation and chemical carcinogens when the Young Turks of today were still in their disposable diapers. He’s been piled in prizes, most recently the Pulitzer for “The Overstory,” a complicated narrative of communicating trees. And yet he himself is sort of a grand old oak of American letters: a towering, sturdy figure often overlooked for flashier species.
Powers’s new book, “Playground,” is an enchanting entry point to his work that swings open easily with just a few creaks.
The title is, as the best are, multifarious. Nominally, it refers to the Reddit-slash-Facebookish internet platform founded by Todd Keane, a white billionaire who has been diagnosed, at 57, with Lewy body dementia. He is reflecting on the erosion of his intense school friendship with Rafi Young, a principled Black bibliomaniac turned NGO worker.
It also points to the central staging area of childhood, where personalities calcify and futures are forged (once opponents in chess and Go, Todd and Rafi are now battling for higher stakes). And more mind-bendingly, the vast expanse of the earth’s oceans, “a rainbow garden painted by Bonnard” where remoras hitch rides on manta rays, octopii chase each other in hide and seek, cuttlefish perform like light shows on the Las Vegas Strip and when conditions are exactly right there are massive, generative orgies: “coral sex parties.”
The news about the warming, rising ocean has been so very grim, many people just don’t want to hear it. Like a visit to the big blue whale exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, “Playground” reminds, with a spirit of fun and wonder, why the sea — an alien planet within a planet — is so very worth sustained attention. You start to understand the zeal that drove the doomed Titan explorers down to the shipwreck that continues to pulse with animal and bacterial life.
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