Richard Powers’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning book The Overstory was one of the landmark novels of the past decade. Grounded in science and animist thought, it was a glorious ode to the wondrousness of trees. Bewilderment (2021) interleaved private loss and climate collapse to recount the grief-soaked journey of an astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son. Both these novels were set in the US. In Playground, his cerebral, Booker-longlisted new novel, Powers swivels part of his attention to French Polynesia, taking on neo-colonialism, artificial intelligence and oceanography.
One strand of the novel unfolds in Illinois in the late 20th century. It follows ocean-loving coding whiz Todd Keane and Rafi Young, a Black book-lover he connects with in high school over chess and, later, the Chinese game of Go. They both come from dysfunctional, if very different, families. Todd’s father is an accomplished pit trader with a secret life; Rafi’s is a boorishly pragmatic firefighter who is always impressing upon him the importance of hard work and excellence in the face of systemic racial inequality. Todd and Rafi deepen their bond during college but begin to drift apart once Ina Aroita, a young sculptor born to a Hawaiian father and a Tahitian mother, enters the picture. Told retrospectively in an italicised first person, these sections are in the voice of 57-year-old Todd, who has dementia with Lewy bodies, and are addressed to a mysterious “you”. Todd is now a digital tycoon, having made his name with a virtual economy platform called Playground. A measure of the book’s suspense comes from Todd’s groundbreaking, if unsettling, experiments with AI.
