Clearly It Is Ocean

Playground by Richard Powers. W. W. Norton & Company, 400 pages. 2024.

In 2016 the novelist Amitav Ghosh published The Great Derangement, which asked how contemporary writers should go about depicting climate change in their work. One of Ghosh’s contentions was that the realist novel as we know it—the thing that most of us have been reading in one form of another since the nineteenth century—isn’t equipped to deal with the vastness of an issue like the Anthropocene. Two years later, as if in answer to Ghosh’s question, the novelist Richard Powers published The Overstory, a novel about redwood forests and the fungal interconnectivity of trees that went on to win the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Big spreads in the New York Times and long interviews on NPR spotlit Powers as a leading literary voice sounding a klaxon call on behalf of the planet, urging us to attend to what we’re losing before it’s too late. In 2021 he published Bewilderment, a father-son tale set in a dystopian future ravaged by climate collapse. Now we have Playground—longlisted, but not shortlisted, for this year’s Booker Prize—the third entry in Richard Powers’s turn toward the climate change novel.

Ghosh’s proposal to writers who want to address climate change was to look to “hybrid forms.” Powers is no stranger to “hybrid fiction”; indeed, it was how he described his novels in a 2002 interview with The Paris Review, by which he meant novels that pulled from metafiction, modernism, and the traditional realist novel. In works like The Gold Bug Variations and Galatea 2.2, Powers used forms like musical counterpoint to write about the discovery of the DNA molecule or invented a character named Richard Powers to train an early model AI in storytelling. But it’s easier to point out what hybridity isn’t than to define it outright. It isn’t the thing we’ve been doing for two hundred years; those techniques common to George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy and Flaubert, they’re not good enough on their own anymore. The party line, for writers like Powers, is that we need new forms to capture what it’s like to be alive in unprecedented times.

From the beginning of his career, Richard Powers’s books were ambitious, sophisticated novels of ideas. Sven Birkerts in 1998 described his works as “architectonic,” their structures frequently complex and often taking precedence over characterization or plot. The Overstory’s story structure was explicitly modeled on the growth of a tree from root to canopy; in Playground the structure remains sophisticated, but the hybridity of Powers’s fiction, which managed to capture genetics and virtual reality in fictional forms like nobody else could, is not in evidence. Instead, Playground is an elaborately structured realist novel with metafictional tendencies, a novel that most frequently reminded me of the work of Charles Dickens.

Playground is divided into three distinct narrative strands. The first is centered on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where American Rafi has settled with his artist wife Ina. A group of Silicon Valley billionaires are proposing to build the world’s first seasteading enterprise in Makatea’s waters, and this section of the novel follows residents of the island including the mayor, an elder known as The Queen, and Rafi and Ina themselves, as they debate whether to accept the billionaires’ proposal. The second strand is centered on the memories of one such tech billionaire, Todd Keane, who has recently been diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies. Keane is the founder of technological giant Playground, one of the secret funders behind the seasteading venture, and Rafi’s childhood best friend. The third narrative strand is devoted to Evelyne, an aging French-Canadian oceanographer modeled on Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle, who at ninety-two is still working, in love with the magnificence of the world’s oceans, and still very much jumping off boats and diving into the waters of the South Pacific. She is engaged in precisely this kind of dive just off Makatea when the seasteading venture is proposed.

Seasteading, for all its science-fictional utopianism, is a real-world libertarian movement born out of Silicon Valley and formalized under the banner of the Seasteading Institute in 2008 by the anarcho-capitalist grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman, with funding provided by Peter Thiel. The seasteaders’ fantasy lies in establishing autonomous communities in the middle of the ocean, free of government oversight or regulation. It is the “move fast and break things” approach to governance. In 2017, the Seasteading Institute did indeed declare that the first such community would be built in the territorial waters of French Polynesia. Comprised of 121 dispersed islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, French Polynesia is extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels. Its territorial waters stretch to nearly two million square miles, making it the world’s largest exclusive economic zone, and—theoretically—an ideal place to test the limits of oceanic jurisdiction. In the end, it didn’t pan out. French Polynesia, already dealing with the consequences of sea level rise, was less interested in Silicon Valley’s soapboxing about autonomy, deregulation, and the tyranny of taxation.

It is this nonfictional proposal that seems to have inspired Powers in Playground. Makatea is also a real French Polynesian island, once a center of phosphate mining, with a present-day population of just under one hundred. The vision of the future the seasteaders offer the fictional Makateans in Playground amounts to an economic revival, coupled with certain environmental degradation, in a place already at ground zero of the climate emergency. Powers opens the novel with a heavy-handed symbol: Ina’s discovery of the body of a seabird on a Makatean beach, its decomposing abdomen filled with two fistfuls of the world’s discarded plastic. In a later scene, Todd Keane attends a 2012 San Francisco meeting where he learns “the name of [his] own beliefs”: a libertarian wariness of government, a faith in the Singularity, and a dawning conviction that “seasteading would do for sociology what the Internet had done for economics: kick out all the jams.” But one of the great disappointments of Playground is how little seasteading—its ideology, its proponents, and its potential impact on the ocean’s flora and fauna—is actually explored. Instead, we get a mess of perspective and a whole lot of backstory.

The majority of the novel is dedicated to Keane and Rafi’s friendship in suburban 1980s Chicago and their eventual falling out at the end of college; seemingly the key event of Keane’s life, spurring him into his career as a tech entrepreneur with little thought as to what kind of evils his innovations might unleash upon the world. In the present, Keane has built a tech empire—Playground—which keeps its users hooked, much like other social media sites, through the deliberate gamification of the platform (users earn “Playbucks” instead of likes or upvotes). Keane has harvested the data of his millions of Playground users to train an AI, and like Mark Zuckerberg, he’s received a public scolding in a congressional hearing to little consequence. He sometimes borders on a caricature of a no-good Silicon Valley billionaire, standing at his window and “looking out on the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the Teslas hummed down Saratoga.” While the novel toggles between the three narrative streams, the only first-person voice is that of Keane. And it is Keane’s first-person voice which makes Playground feel slightly off, as though Powers were hiding the real meat of a rarely told story behind a character we are already—culturally and economically—intimately familiar with. To give the Silicon Valley billionaire the lone “I”—and characterize him with gee-whiz sympathy as a boy genius who loved computers and chess and who didn’t pay attention to the waywardness of techno-capitalist culture—serves to only reassert the depressing truth about the world we live in.

Powers might argue that the metafictional turn he’s built into Playground means he has to let Keane do the talking. This is because—and I’m going to spoil the twist here—Keane occasionally addresses a “you,” but only in the final thirty pages of the book do we learn it’s the AI he’s been training with all that user data. The story we’ve been reading— from Evelyne’s oceanography career to the daily lives of Ina and Rafi on Makatea, to the seasteading venture itself—has been a fiction the AI has been writing for Keane’s benefit, a wishful fantasy that Rafi’s life had turned out differently after their falling out. In “reality,” Rafi and Ina broke up, and Rafi stayed in Urbana, living in a rented basement apartment, working in the university library, and “died of what black people die of so often in America: a heart attack.” If this sounds insulting, it is no more insulting than the language Powers routinely puts into Rafi’s mouth: “Listen, honky. You are not driving into that ’hood in this auto-mo-bile”; “Dope look, mutha! But that shirt be wack,” and “That ain’t capitalism, Boo.”

Powers’s novels have long been interested in technology. His debut, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was about photography and the technological advances that paved the way for WWI, Plowing the Dark explored virtual reality, and Playground revisits the subject of Galatea 2.2, his first foray into artificial intelligence. “Narrative is a response to crisis,” he once said, “And crisis, in modern human existence, is usually a function of technology.” So why does the late-stage AI revelation in Playground feel like such a gimmick? The critic Sianne Ngai argues that the gimmick is the capitalist form par excellence, “overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).” The revelation that the novel we’ve been reading has been an AI hallucination has the underwhelming it-was-all-a-dream quality of The Wizard of Oz or Lost. It not only invalidates everything that came before, it confronts the worrying power of AI with no more nuance than you’d encounter on the average leftish Twitter feed.

In a 1998 interview with Bomb, Powers observed, “What’s true for narrative is also true for technology. We’re trying to invent our way out of crisis.” Yet in Playground, which offers up so many ideas ripe for innovation, the story is lost inside the plot. The task of reimagining the narrative in the face of perpetual technological change falls by the wayside, in favor an easy, smaller, story scale. Evelyne happens to be diving off Makatea when the seasteading venture is proposed, Rafi happens to fall in love with a woman from French Polynesia to justify his moving to the same island where Keane will happen to find the perfect location for his enterprise. Until the revelation of its ending, Playground seeps forward on the tide of Dickensian coincidence. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of plot construction per se. It’s very often pleasant. But the seams are always visible. The novel is diminished by enormous histories, concerns, movements, and crises shrunk down to the size of an interpersonal drama between two young men in suburban Chicago. Given the geopolitical resonance of its subject, it is frustrating to be asked to digest it in the shape of something so small, and—frankly—so dull.

Take Evelyne, less a character than an information delivery mechanism. Any time Powers wants the reader to understand the evolution of twentieth-century oceanography, Evelyne is at ground zero: in a lecture hall arguing about continental drift, learning about the discovery of the Mariana Trench, in a submersible observing heretofore unknown behaviors of heretofore unknown species. This is one of the most trying conventions of the traditional, realist novel: when a writer just wants to tell you something but feels they must make up a character and gracelessly drop her into a scene in order to do so. Clearly there are barriers a novelist encounters if they’re going to write about the lived experience of climate change. The global events of global warming can feel, interpersonally at least, disconnected. Changes like coastal erosion, insect population depletion, or the deceleration of the earth’s rotation are incredibly slow, except when they’re incredibly fast. Anglophone writers tend to characterize the natural world as an objective correlative for human phenomena: King Lear’s storm is not really a storm, it’s his inner turmoil, his evolving madness. When we’re talking ocean acidification and melting glaciers—well, there’s no human being standing there holding a flame to the glacier to center your drama around. These are problems, but they’re interesting problems to have, which writers can and should be equipped to tackle. The novel, after all, is the most plastic of forms.

But Powers doesn’t “invent [his] way out of crisis” in Playground. He uses nothing that would have been unfamiliar to Dickens, excepting the AI twist, which is not so very different from Ebenezer Scrooge awakening from his long night of dreaming on Christmas morning a changed man. There are so many novels of ideas—some of the best having been written by Richard Powers—which have broadened the kinds of stories available under one cover. Nor are they universally newfangled or performatively postmodern: John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Thornton Wilder played around with structure to accommodate unwieldy presents. But Playground does not do that.

If I am being hard on Playground, it’s because when Richard Powers is at his best, his books feel like they’re paving the way for a deeper level of understanding about the world we live in, and how literature might illuminate it. Where Powers is most adept in this novel is his evocation of the sea: its beauty and its mystery. The sections in which we move with Evelyne underwater are the most beautiful and poignant of the novel. It is a shame, really, that Evelyne is denied the ability to speak for herself and is reduced to a function, because whenever we return to Keane’s consciousness, the novel loses its color and there is a sense that you’re being pulled back into the family room to listen to your great uncle speak about how nobody “back then” could have predicted the “neural parasites” that today cause him to compulsively check Facebook and the “addictive farming games.”

The idea of play is threaded through Playground: not only in the games of chess and Go with which Keane and Rafi share a youthful obsession; not only in the gamification of life that underpins the rise of the tech giants like Playground; and not only in the “create-out-of-the-ruins” ethos of Ina’s artmaking. Play is posited as the heart of our humanity. Towards the end of the novel, we focus on the closing image of Evelyne’s 1970s groundbreaking oceanography book for young people, Clearly It Is Ocean: a cuttlefish underwater, dancing, its behavior magical and inexplicable, as so much of the ocean remains. In the dance of the cuttlefish lies the joyous mystery of what it means to be alive, and this is what is worth cherishing and preserving. It’s the source of hope Powers hands us in the face of the climate crisis and the threat posed by artificial intelligence.

One might have extended this idea of play and playfulness to the novel’s form itself. After all, that’s the spirit of hybridity—play around and see what you come up with. Instead, the revelation that the entire novel has been an AI hallucination is an inside-facing trick, and the novel in the end feels circumscribed, frustratingly predetermined; the very opposite of play.