Playground (4*)

"What just happened?" I asked myself, incredulously, as I read the final chapter of Playground, a novel that hadn't yet risen to the level of Richard Powers' last magnificent book, although both appeared to be cut from the same environmental-friendly cloth.  But after thinking about the off-putting twist for a day, Playground might just do that for an entirely different reason: it inspires fear, rather than awe, or maybe I'm just a Luddite overthinking things.  

The sentimental and not-quite-believable story filled with too many coincidences begins on a French Polynesian beach, where Ina Aroita and her two children pick up plastic detritus that has choked a bird.  They take it home where Ina begins to incorporate the colorful pieces into a sculpture that morphs into a symbolic totem and funerary boat by the book's end.  We soon find out Ina is married to Rafi Young, an African-American poet from Chicago who also happens to be the estranged best friend of Todd Keane, the privileged tech entrepreneur responsible for building the world's most successful social media platform, which gives the book its title and a theme that that Powers beats like a dead horse.  

Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

A lonely man in the end stages of Lewy body dementia who once loved Ina too,  Todd is behind an effort to re-colonize Makatea, Ina's and Rafi's little bit of back-to-earth paradise, through seasteading, a development that Rafi opposes even before he becomes aware of Todd's hidden involvement.  Evie Beaulieu, a seventy-something oceanographer, whose illustrated children's book, the delightfully titled Clearly It Is Ocean, once enabled Todd to imagine he could breathe underwater in Lake Michigan and live with the fishes to escape his parents' horrible marriage, joins the anti-colonizers, a raft of mostly underdeveloped stock characters, including an old hermit and a dancing queen who borders on indigenous caricature.  

The more I describe the plot of Playground, the more ridiculous it sounds, which may be the point, particularly when the entire population of 85 Makateans--including the kids--participates in a cheesily suspenseful referendum to decide the future course of the island, partially enabled by the ready assistance of Profunda, an AI assistant who makes Einstein look like Alexa.  A single vote decides the outcome, tipping the hand of the novel's "real" author, whose enraging and subversive identity I will not spoil.

Even if I'm wrong about Powers' intentions, there's a lot to like and learn in Playground, particularly Evie's descriptions of aquatic life, rhapsodic and hallucinogenic in equal measure.  Her agenda, an admirable one, also seems to be one that Powers shares and used to sublime effect in his more single-minded novel about trees:

With each new press conference, she [Evie] grew bolder in preaching the gospel of the oceans. Becoming a part of them would give the troubled race of men something to aspire toward. Once people witnessed the abundance of underwater life, once they lived there, they would ache to take care of the place like it was their home. 

Reading Playground is a little bit watching like a great actor playing a bad one:  you can't deny the talent involved even if the performance isn't nearly as enjoyable.

The Overstory (5*)

I'd been suspicious of a very long novel about . . . trees until Jane Fonda raved about it. Richard Powers isn't shy about his agenda, articulated by Adam, a psychologist and newly recruited eco warrior, when asked how people can be persuaded of the need to end deforestation:

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind.  The only thing that can do that is a good story.

Later, an attorney who has dismissed fiction his entire life, experiences a post-stroke conversion and offers an equally compelling counterpoint:

He can't remember why fiction used to make him so impatient.  Nothing else has more power now to get him through the hours before lunch.  He hangs on the most ridiculous plot turns, as if the future of humanity depends on it.

The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands.  But they share a core so obvious it passes for given.  Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive--character--is all that matters in the end.  It's a child's creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court.  To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.  No:  life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Powers tells AND shows through a metaphorical structure that only becomes clear after identifying the "roots" of his story through a series of highly differentiated character studies, each packing an emotional wallop but also cleverly identified with a species of tree and loaded with historical and scientific details that had me shaking my head in wonder and amazement.  He also turns beautiful and resonant phrases, page after page:

 a new TV as big as Wyoming 

Then whiteout.  Gauze bandages across the windshield.

Chance, that comedian with the perfect timing.

Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

Perhaps I'm more susceptible to the powers of this book (pun intended) because nature IS god in my universe, a position I'm pretty certain the author shares although he leans Buddhist, too.  After an encounter with a wild bear in a national park ends well, a daughter asks her Chinese father if he was afraid.

He laughs, embarrassed. Not my time yet.  Not my story."

The words chill her.  How can he know his story, ahead of time?  But she doesn't ask him that.  Instead, she says, "What did you say to it?"

His brow crumples.  he shrugs.  What else is there to say, to a bear?  "Apologize.  I tell him, people very stupid.  They forget everything--where they come from, where they go.  Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again."

Less convincing is Powers's expectation that artificial intelligence will save the earth either by redeeming mankind with a video game or dispensing with people altogether.  Either fate is beyond my imagination, and my belief in the power of art to change things is too strong. How, for example, could AI write an epitaph such as this delivered after the first of two suicides that make perfect sense?

An old man,

I want only peace.

The things of this world

mean nothing.

I know no good way

to live and I can’t

stop getting lost in my

thoughts, my ancient forests.

The wind that waves the pines

loosens my belt.

The mountain moon lights me

as I play my lute.

You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?

The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.' 

Read this powerful book!  You'll never look at trees the same way again.  You might even be galvanized to do something on behalf of them, to repay their favor.

Thanks, Jane.