Review: Richard Powers' 'Playground'

 

As this is a blog for people who like to read, I'd like to write a bit about a new novel that impressed me a lot, Playground by Richard Powers. 

Powers has been one of my favorite writers for years. He had a career as a well-regarded literary novelist who didn't sell a lot of books until The Overstory (2018) which was a surprise big hit that sold many copies. 

If you don't know Powers (no relation to the "Richard Powers" who did covers for SF books), he has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant (in the early days of the award). As far as literary merit goes, Playground seems to me an excellent novel, on a par with The Gold Bug Variations, The Echo Maker and The Overstory, which are generally considered the best of Powers' 14 novels. Playground currently is longlisted for the Booker Award. (I also am especially fond of Orfeo, which is largely about classical music.)

The novel is largely set in  Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, in Chicago and various seashore locations; whereas The Overstory focuses on trees, Playground focuses on the ocean and the sea creatures who live in it. The main characters are a woman who becomes a famous Canadian diver, a programmer from the Chicago area who becomes a wealthy tech company founder, his best friend, a Black young man from a tough background who has a literary bent, and a woman with a Polynesian background who is the love interest for the two young men. There is a plot that brings all of them together but I don't want to give away any spoilers. Powers has often shown interest in saving the environment, and that's one of the themes of this book, too. 

Aside from the ocean stuff, there's a lot about AI and computers (Powers was a computer programmer when he quit his job to try his hand at writing a novel, and computer technology comes up a lot in his work. Wikipedia: "One Saturday in 1980, Powers saw the 1914 photograph 'Young Farmers' by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was so inspired that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in the photograph.")

While Powers is a different writer than Robert Anton Wilson, I will mention a couple of things they have in common. 

As I mentioned in a previous  post, each of the two writers have a favorite composer, and references to the composer recut in their work. For RAW of course, it's Beethoven; for Powers, it's Johann Sebastian Bach. In that earlier post, I wrote, "I have been reading the new Richard Powers novel, Playground, and I'm on page 141. Johann Sebastian Bach hasn't put in an appearance yet." Bach does turn up late in the novel.

Perhaps more significantly, like Wilson, Powers doesn't limit himself on the number of topics he will cram into a  novel. Wilson's fiction encompasses political theory, magick, the innovations of James Joyce, history and on and on. The new Powers novel takes deep dives into oceanography, racism, history, computer science, the game of Go, the fauna of offshore reefs, and I'm surely forgetting a few things.