Reviews for Playground : a novel
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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 © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
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.
Library Journal
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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
Publishers Weekly
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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.)
