Book Review :: Playground by Richard Powers

Review by Kevin Brown

The obvious playground in Richard Powers’ newest novel is an online platform Todd Keane developed, where users can submit comments people vote on for electronic currency, of sorts. He worked it out shortly after graduating college, which he attended with his best friend, Rafi Young, who wants to be a poet. The title also describes their love of games, in general, as they bond over chess, then Go, and even their relationship is a type of competitive game.

However, the ocean is also a type of playground, as Evie Beaulieu learns early in her life when her father uses her to test an early type of scuba equipment, leading her to spend as much time as she can underwater. She falls in love with the way the undersea animals play with one another or even by themselves. Unfortunately, humans also see the ocean as their playground, one more space they can colonize, disrupting and destroying the lives of those who were already there.

Ina Aroita’s life reinforces that idea, as she grew up on naval bases throughout the Pacific, but ends up on Makatea in French Polynesia, an island that phosphate mining had ravaged years before. Evie and Rafi are also there by the end of the novel, and a group of investors wants to use Makatea as a launching pad for man-made islands that exist outside of national jurisdictions (and, thus, regulations).

The narration moves between Todd’s telling his story to an unnamed listener—though the reader will ultimately discover who he’s talking to—and the stories of the three other characters until they all intersect on Makatea near the end of the novel. Powers also pulls a narrative trick, leaving the reader to wonder if the novel itself is one more playground, this time one that works for good.

In the same way that Powers helped readers see forests differently in Overstory, it’s clear he wants readers to wonder at the world beneath the sea, as he critiques the ways humanity has actively damaged oceans and the lives within. This time, though, he wants to remind readers that novelists can play, as well as preach.

Playground by Richard Powers. W.W. Norton, 2024.

Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite