Book Review | ‘Playground’ by Richard Powers

In some ways, Richard Powers’s new novel Playground is a double bildungsroman, showing us the youth and early adulthood of Todd Kean — white; a native of Evanston, Illinois; and the son of a wealthy family — and Rafi Young — Black, born on the West Side of Chicago, the son of bitterly divorced working-class parents. Both Todd and Rafi are classic Powers characters: brilliant, conflicted, egomaniacal and yet often full of regrets.

Rafi is drawn to reading and literature while Todd is an early computer whiz, but they are both passionate about games. They meet in the chess club at St. Ignatius Prep School, but they soon leave behind that limited sport for the far more complex board game of Go, which, appropriately, is played with white and black stones.

We know early on from Todd’s first-person narrative that he is now incredibly successful, but he arrived at his fortune not through attendance at Harvard or Stanford — those bastions of tech start-ups — but, due to his parents’ financial misfortunes, by going to Powers’s own alma mater, the University of Illinois. Rafi joins him there on a scholarship and for three years they embrace everything the university has to offer, until, during the fall of their senior year, Rafi meets and falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Pacific Islander who has grown up on naval bases throughout the Pacific. Ina is, of course, also brilliant, though her specialty is sculpture. The three of them quickly form what seems an unbreakable bond during a period that is central to the rest of all their lives.

The other characters are important to the story, but ultimately Todd is our protagonist. He turns out to be a combination of Mark Zuckerburg, Jack Dorsey, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk — not necessarily an easy group of people to love. Todd’s great wealth is largely derived from Playground, a Facebook-like social media platform where people earn points depending on the popularity of their posts. What saves Todd from presenting as a callous tech billionaire is his love for Rafi, his almost innocent faith in his AI creation, Profunda, and the fact that he is dying from Lewy body dementia.

That last twist raises a point of view problem that Powers doesn’t entirely overcome. Todd may be a genius, but I’ve known people suffering from Lewy body, and their verbal and cognitive skills are considerably diminished. Todd, however? Even with his ups and downs, not so much. Here for, instance, is his description of a hallucination during the late stages of the disease. Writing in the first-person, he sees “an oceangoing manta ray … flying through an ocean of atmosphere across the cathedral ceiling of my bedroom.” His response: “In that moment, all the chaotic buildup of rogue alpha-synuclein proteins that was wrecking my brain felt worth the glimpse.” Um, “rogue alpha-synuclein proteins”? Even if Todd is being assisted in his composition process by Profunda, this seems to stretch credulity.

Far more believable are Powers’s rhapsodic descriptions of the ocean, especially as seen through the eyes of world-famous diver Evelyne Beaulieu. Growing up in Bangkok, Powers wanted to be an oceanographer, and he would often snorkel in the reefs of the South China Sea. His evocations of undersea life, therefore, are more than just the product of his famously in-depth research, and Evelyne demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of ocean creatures. Here she is, diving among the wreckage of a World War II battle in Micronesia:

“Spectral sponges in crazy numbers — silver, pallid, and alabaster — encrusted the gunwales and waved in the current. Milky glassfish patrolled the wreck’s burst holes. Clouds of nacreous pearly dartfish and blue-green chromis damselfish schooled around [Evelyne], running their own investigations. The reds, burgundies, and oranges of marble shrimp in all their stages clattered through the hidey-holes of the jumbled metal, looking like animated Christmas cards. Parrotfish, groupers, cardinalfish, gobies, two-tone darts, wrasses, blennies, scorpionfish, jellies and other cnidarians: she couldn’t begin to name all the colors.”

While the sheer number and names of the fishes may be overwhelming for readers, this catalog does exactly what Powers wants it to do: it suggests the incredible plentitude of life undersea, even in the face of human-induced die-off.

The other major strand in the narrative is life on the tiny Polynesian island of Makatea. There, Rafi and Ina have made a home, adopting two charming orphaned children. Life on Makatea, with a population of fewer than one hundred people, is largely peaceful, if mostly impoverished after the ravages of Western phosphate mining. However, a group of California investors is interested in using the island as a base to build floating, self-contained pods — the first step in a plan to develop “seasteading” as a new habitat for humans. The islanders are presented with a dilemma, which they must vote on themselves: do they accept the money and become rich but possibly ruin their island once again, or do they continue to live in a down-market paradise, a place perpetually short on essentials like medical care?

As the islanders make their decision, there is a bit of narrative trickery at the end, but it all makes sense and only adds to the conclusion’s poignancy. Powers entered the U of I as a physics major, and all his novels have been laden with technical information — sometimes too much. Nevertheless, as he’s aged, his characters have grown more complex, and in Playground — as in his two previous novels, Bewilderment and The Overstory — he is writing as well as any American author currently practicing their craft.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.

Editor’s Note: UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Richard Powers in Conversation with Pico Iyer on Sunday, February 23, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. at Campbell Hall. For more information, see artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/events-tickets/events/24-25/richard-powers.