Book Review: PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers

Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(Not a review, just a heart-full/brainless rave by a fan about someone who draws meaning out of contemporary chaos)

"What are all creatures - even me - doing at all times but playing in the world, playing before their tinkering Lord?"

If one had never heard of Richard Powers before this book, this fact would tell us that he is no ordinary author: his latest novel was included in the Booker Longlist even before the book’s release.

I remember reading my first Richard Powers in 2021 (his latest then was BEWILDERMENT), and being completely blown away by how easily he cracked both brain and heart open, and how he effortlessly blended so many fields of study in his book. He is that rare author who makes his reader care deeply for whatever he’s writing about, whether it be trees (the Pulitzer prize winning THE OVERSTORY) or how classical music knows no race (THE TIME OF OUR SINGING, still my favorite of all eight of his works I’ve consumed). And ever since then, he has been my favorite author.

Powers has a way of putting a human face on the greatest concerns of humanity, and telling it in the most profound prose. He’s unafraid to break hearts if needed, to get his point across, but even the tragic ones always end with hope. What varies is the time and the place, but regardless of where it’s set, his words bestow the sacredness of sheer love on whatever/whoever he writes about. Throughout the decades (he’s written one novel every 3 or 4 years, since 1985) he sets down the current generation’s great moral dilemma of the day, allowing us to glimpse a way forward.

PLAYGROUND is no different. If we reduce this book to a mere formula, it would be something like “Save the oceans + Beware of AI,” or “Four different people all over the globe are drawn to Makatea in French Polynesia, which might as well be the center of the world” and it would at once be correct yet completely wrong.

Because a writer such as Powers, and his books, defy diminishment in all forms. They do the opposite: they enlarge mind and heart. And while PLAYGROUND isn’t quite his best work (I’m really partial to THE TIME OF OUR SINGING, as you can tell since this is the second time I’ve title-dropped it), it is a fine, fine novel that a lesser author would be proud to call his masterpiece.

The frame narrative is genius. It begins with the Polynesian myth of creation, then what seems to be the unburdening of a man approaching death and dementia. A long kind of deathbed confession. But to whom is he speaking? Who is narrating, who is writing? The realization, when it came, hit me with the bodily force of an earthquake.

Come read and find out, and in the process, rejoice in this communal act of creation books offer.

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