Review: Playground

Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a great book. I don’t know whether it will still be great in a decade – some of what seems cutting edge and provocative today may turn out to be obvious or cliched – but, as they say, get it while it’s hot.

Powers often works with multiple perspectives in his stories, letting us see pieces of the narrative from different angles and bringing them together as part of a slow-boiling, usually satisfying conclusion.

Here, we have the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, a Mark Zuckerberg-like figure who reveals somewhat early on that he is suffering from Lewy Body dementia and knows that he will die soon.

Todd’s earliest memories have him dealing with his parents’ acrimonious marriage. His father had been a successful trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, allowing them to live in a “castle” off Lake Michigan. He dealt with his father’s competitive, maybe Oedipal-fearing teaching him of chess by imagining himself underwater, walking on the floor of Lake Michigan – an experience informed for him by a book written by the pioneering scuba-diver Evie Beaulieu.

When he’s at school – first at a Jesuit high school and then at the University of Illinois – he becomes close to Rafi Young, a poet from a tough African-American neighborhood. The two bond over games, especially chess and go, and it’s Rafi’s suggestion that Todd ‘gamify’ his new social media platform that distinguishes it from its competitors and turns Todd into a billionaire.

Todd falls in love with Ina, a Pacific Islander, and they form something of a triangular relationship until, in a well-intentioned effort to repair a lover’s quarrel, Todd inadvertently betrays a secret of Rafi’s. Todd refuses to forgive him, eventually demands money for his contributions to Playground, and the two remain distant throughout their adult lives.

(view spoiler)[We learn eventually that Todd has no heirs and that he is narrating his experiences to an AI that, he hopes, will “bring back” from the dead the people he has loved, permitting him the chance at a reconciliation he never experienced. Although we don’t realize it for most of the novel, the AI narrates the events on the island of Makatea – where Evie has gone for a blissful final season of diving in unspoiled waters and where Todd and Ina, inexplicably together again after their fight, are raising two orphaned islanders.

Makatea faces an existential threat…or opportunity. A major consortium wants to use it as a base for building sea cities, floating spaces that will not be subject to national laws. (The idea seems to come from a Peter Thiel-like billionaire.) The islanders have to vote whether to accept all that will bring, and matters come to a head when Rafi realizes that Todd is the lead investor.

The great twist of the novel comes in the closing pages when we learn that almost none of this has happened. Rafi died long before, alone, in a small room. He did leave the money he got from Todd to Ina, but they never reunited. We don’t know what happened to Evie (or, if we do, I missed it in the tumult of so many revelations), but it seems likely that she’s another figure Todd has taught the AI narrator to imagine as part of his happy ending.

The bitter truth of the novel is that Todd is dying alone. He’s lived his life immersed in the world of social media, becoming a detached and lonely billionaire in the process, and he’s hoping to fulfill his lost best friend’s dream of using poetry to bring the dead back. (Rafi early on lost a beloved sister, and that drives much of his art.)

The implications of all this are stunning, but, as I suggest, they may turn out to be dated. One way or another, we will resolve some of how artificial intelligence relates to the creative process. We will also come to recognize – as pathology, lifestyle choice, or strategy for particular success – what it means to live a virtual life over a real one. (hide spoiler)]

For now, Powers is asking questions we are just wrestling with. Like his protagonist Todd, he’s on the ground floor of a social media world that’s shaping how we are coming to shape our own art.

I should add that much of this is beautifully written. That’s a Powers’s trademark, something I say having now read his four most recent books.

Weirdly, the one I like least is The Overstory, the one that’s gotten the most attention. Other than this, I also think that Orfeo is stunning.

Anyway, the guy is definitely worth reading, and this one may be – for the next few years at least – the best place to see him at his best.


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