Playground A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Powers does for oceans in Playground what he did for forests in The Overstory (2018). He again assembles a cast of evocatively nuanced characters obsessed with nature, science, and games. Canadian Evelyne becomes a pioneering oceanographer (à la Sylvia Earle) who writes a book that transfixes Todd, a lonely boy in an Evanston "castle." In nearby Chicago, brainy Rafi suffers a family tragedy just as he receives a fellowship to attend an elite Jesuit high school. There he and Todd forge a competitive friendship over chess, then ascend to the more mysterious game, Go. Todd accrues enormous wealth with his social media platform, Playground. Rafi sets aside his considerable academic achievements to live a quiet Pacific island life with artist Ina. Powers tacks back and forth in time in this encompassing saga punctuated by Evelyne's marveling over the stunning inventiveness of undersea life as, now in her nineties, she dives off the coast of Makatea, in French Polynesia. Still struggling to recover from a decimating 1960s phosphate-mining frenzy, the island now faces a new threat--a seasteading startup. Throughout, Powers reflects on how innate play is to many species as a way of learning and bonding and how human technology has turned it catastrophic. Rhapsodic with wonder, electric with cautionary facts and insights, Powers' profound and involving novel illuminates the conundrums of human nature and the gravely endangered ocean deep.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers rely on Powers to dramatize the confounding paradox of our utter dependence on and rampant destruction of nature.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pulitzer winner Powers (The Overstory) delivers an epic drama of AI, neocolonialism, and oceanography in this dazzling if somewhat disjointed novel set largely on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where a mysterious American consortium plans to launch floating cities into the ocean. The story centers on three characters: Rafi Young, a former literature student from an abusive home in Chicago who has moved to Makatea with his wife; Rafi's onetime friend Todd Keane, the billionaire founder of a social media company and AI platform whose connection to the seasteading project is revealed later; and Evelyne Beaulieu, a Canadian marine biologist who has come to Makatea just as the island's residents must vote on whether to let the project proceed. For some Makateans, the seasteading initiative raises hopes of economic renewal; for others, it triggers fears of environmental destruction and a return to colonialist oppression. Powers's characters can be implausibly cerebral and pure of heart, and his narrative threads never fully cohere, but the elegance of his prose, the scope of his ambition, and the exacting reverence with which he writes about the imperiled natural world serve as reminders of why he ranks among America's foremost novelists. "The ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement," Powers writes of Evelyne, "into a place far larger than anything human." Readers will be awed. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Powers's (The Overstory) novel begins with a creation myth. Ta'aroa makes an egg to house himself, cracks out of his shell, and uses the shards to make the world. It's a glorious start to a transcendent novel about love and what humanity has done to our damaged world. Marine biologists Evelyn and Bart love each other but even more, Evelyne loves the ocean. Still diving in her 90s, she lives in Makatea, French Polynesia (population 82). Rafi and Todd were high school buddies but also antagonists, Rafi twisted by his parents' anger toward white people, Todd ignored by white parents unable to see him. They bond over Go and room together in college. Rafi meets Polynesian artist Ina, everything he could want. But it can't free him from his conflicted relationship with a world he can't accept. Decades later, mega-rich Todd embraces a project to transform the world by creating artificial islands floating on the sea; the residents of Makatea must vote on whether to accept the project. Todd and Rafi meet again but Todd, who now has dementia, can't communicate. The book ends unresolved. What will the future hold for Makatea? And us? VERDICT Powers's extraordinary novels are a rebuttal to the notion that what stirs the mind can't also stir the heart.--David Keymer

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A story of friendship, technology, oceans, and a small island. Powers juggled nine lead characters inThe Overstory (2018), his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel. Here he wrangles just four, but the result is almost as complicated. Two nerdish boys, Rafi Young and Todd Keane, bond in high school over chess and Go. In college, Rafi falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Hawaii-born Navy brat whose mother is Tahitian. The men fall out shortly after brainstorming over Todd's idea for a computer game called Playground. This strand of the novel is told in retrospect by Todd at age 57, addressing an unidentified "you," after he receives a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies; he's an unreliable narrator in more than one way. Interspersed are scenes in later years on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, scarred by phosphate mining and down to a population of 82, including Rafi and Ina and the novel's fourth lead, an elderly Canadian scuba diver named Evelyne Beaulieu. Her lifelong love of the diversity and preciousness of aquatic life provides the book's other narrative strand and its environmental theme. Through Todd, Powers sketches the computer and social media revolutions, from early coding to gaming to AI. The counterpoint to this high-tech history is Makatea, a paradise lost to industrial mining that decades later must decide whether to accept a consortium's lucrative proposal to use the island to build floating autonomous cities. This is a challenging novel, fragmented but compelling, with fine writing on friendship and its loss and on the awe and delight the ocean inspires. Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys' competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers. An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Before the earth, before the moon, before the stars, before the sun, before the sky, even before the sea, there was only time and Ta'aroa. - Ta'aroa made Ta'aroa. Then he made an egg that could house him. He set the egg spinning in the void. Inside the spinning egg, suspended in that endless vacuum, Ta'aroa huddled, waiting. With all that endless time and all that eternal waiting, Ta'aroa grew weary inside his egg. So he shook his body and cracked the shell and slid out of his self-made prison. Outside, everything was muted and still. And Ta'aroa saw that he was alone. Ta'aroa was an artist, so he played with what he had. His first medium was eggshell. He crunched the shell into countless pieces and let them fall. The pieces of eggshell drifted down to make the foundations of the Earth. His second medium was tears. He cried in his boredom and his loneliness, and his tears filled up the Earth's oceans and its lakes and all the world's rivers. His third medium was bone. He used his spine to make islands. Mountain chains appeared wherever his vertebrae rose above his pooled tears. Creation became a game. From his fingernails and toenails, he made the scales of fish and the shells of turtles. He plucked out his own feathers and turned them into trees and bushes, which he filled with birds. With his own blood, he spread a rainbow across the sky. Ta'aroa summoned all the other artists. The artists came forward with their baskets full of materials-- sand and pebbles, corals and shells, grass and palm fronds and threads spun from the fibers of many plants. And together with Ta'aroa, the artists shaped and sculpted Tāne, the god of forests and peace and beauty and all crafted things. Then the artists brought the other gods into being-- scores of them. Kind ones and cruel ones, lovers and engineers and tricksters. And these gods filled in the rest of the unfolding world with color and line and creatures of all kinds-- land, air, and sea. Tāne decided to decorate the sky. He toyed with the possibilities, dotting the blackness with points of light that spun around the center of the night in great pinwheels. He made the sun and moon, which split time into day and night. Now that there were days and months, now that the world was sparked with branching and unfolding life, now that the sky was itself a work of art, it was time for Ta'aroa to finish his game. He fashioned and split the world into seven layers, and in the bottom most layer he put people-- someone to play with at last. He watched the people puzzle things out, and it delighted him. The people multiplied and filled the lowest layer like fish fill up a reef. The people found plants and trees and animals and shells and rocks, and with all their discoveries they made new things, just as Ta'aroa had made the world. Growing in number, human beings felt hemmed in. So when they discovered the portal that led up to the level of the world above theirs-- the doorway that Ta'aroa had hidden just for them-- they pried it open, passed through, and started spreading out again, one layer higher. And so people kept on filling and climbing, filling and climbing. But each new layer still belonged to Ta'aroa, who set all things moving from inside his spinning egg. - It took a disease eating my brain to help me remember. The three of us were walking home from campus one night in December, almost forty years ago. The year that Ina first set foot on a continent. We had seen a student production of The Tempest and she'd sobbed through the whole last act. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. Rafi and I escorted her back to her boardinghouse, a dozen blocks from the Quad. Ina wasn't used to square blocks. They disoriented her. She kept getting turned around. Everything distracted her and stopped her in her tracks. A crow. A gray squirrel. The December moon. We tried to warm her, Rafi and I, one on each side, each almost twice her height. Her first-ever winter. The cold was homicidal. She kept saying, "How can people live in this? How do the animals survive? It's insanity! Pure madness!" Then she stopped in place on the sidewalk and yanked us both by the elbows. Her red face was round with awe. "Oh, God. Look at that. Look at that!" Neither of us could tell what in the world she was seeing. Little pellets were dropping through the air and landing on the grass with a faint click. They stuck to the ends of the frozen blades like white, wet flowers. I hadn't even noticed. Nor had Rafi. Chicago boys, raised on the lake effect. Ina had never seen anything like it. She was watching bits of eggshell fall from the sky to make the Earth. She stood there on the iron sidewalk, freezing to death, cursing us in joy. "Would you look at that? Look at that! You stupid shits! Why didn't you tell me about snow?" Excerpted from Playground by Richard Powers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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