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Oct 18, 2024

Richard Powers's 'Playground' Is Didactic, but It Works - The Atlantic

Richard Powers’s recent novels have traded complexity for preachiness, but his latest is an effective twist on AI panic. This article contains spoilers for Playground. From paintings on ancient cave

Richard Powers’s recent novels have traded complexity for preachiness, but his latest is an effective twist on AI panic.

This article contains spoilers for Playground.

From paintings on ancient cave walls to parables, fables, and memes, animals have served as important storytelling tools. For instance, in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, the narrator describes the novel’s title character, a fearsome, mercurial poet, by observing, “A surfaced whale beside your boat might look at you as he looked with his wide-set gray eyes.” This deceptively simple metaphor challenges us to imagine an unsettling encounter with a big, strange presence, and situates us in a literary tradition with its sly allusion to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bellow’s simile is instructive insofar as it’s evocative, and appealingly demanding in its layers of meaning compressed into a single sentence.

Contrast this with an artist’s encounter, in Richard Powers’s new novel, Playground, with a juvenile albatross: “Ina reached her hand into the chest of the decomposing bird and drew out two bottle caps, a squirt top, the bottom of a black film canister at least fifteen years old, a disposable cigarette lighter, a few meters of tangled-up monofilament line, and a button in the shape of a daisy.”

Like many passages in Playground, this teaches me important and timely things in serviceable prose: Plastics are bad because they kill birds; the consequences of human despoilment are gruesome if we dare look closely enough. I get it, I get it all too easily, when I read Powers’s preachier novels, whether they’re about trees (The Overstory), race (The Time of Our Singing), refugees (Generosity), or the challenges of single fatherhood for astrobiologists (Bewilderment). Powers has also written novels of greater subtlety, driven by a purist’s fascination with the inner workings of complex systems and instruments: The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, Orfeo, Plowing the Dark.

Playground seems on the surface to belong in the first group—the flat-character morality plays that have come to define Powers’s later career. It extends and deepens his ongoing project of telling stories that combine lyrical mastery with environmentalist didacticism to criticize humankind’s treatment of the world while attending to the promise of the nonhuman—natural and artificial. The setup of his latest also addresses the reader’s dilemma in confronting such work: What, exactly, is the contemporary novel for? To teach, or to challenge? Fortunately, for those who stick with Playground to the end, Powers doesn’t answer the question in flattering ways but instead complicates it confidently, exploring what art might look like in a less human future.

Read: Writing the Pulitzer-winning The Overstory changed Richard Powers’s life

The new novel begins with a creation story cum prayer about Ta’aroa, the Indigenous Polynesian creator god, before proceeding to detail the dilemmas of people living on the remote South Pacific island Makatea. During the early years of the 20th century, when the island was rich in phosphate crucial to industrial agriculture, it was ruined by the extraction work of foreign companies. It’s finally recovering when its 82 remaining human inhabitants are approached by a conglomerate seeking a host to build components of future floating cities. These new artificial islands will serve as swanky sanctuaries for uber-elites hoping to ride out the collapse of human society (or maybe just escape state regulations).

The novel’s human drama plays out as the islanders determine whether to vote yes to the seasteading project, and focuses on the intertwined stories of four main characters. Ina, a half-Polynesian sculptor and an attentive mom, and her husband, Rafi, a literary-minded Black educator, both live on Makatea. Todd, who is white, is Rafi’s boyhood friend turned enemy: They first bonded as bookish Chicago kids from dysfunctional families who loved playing Go. Todd is now the billionaire founder of a world-beating, all-in-one social-media, gaming, and commerce platform called Playground—and also the discreet money behind the seasteading endeavor. The project is in many ways motivated by Todd’s lifelong love of the ocean, itself inspired by the novel’s fourth major character, Evie, a trailblazing French Canadian scuba diver and scientist who holds Jane Goodall–grade celebrity status.

Playground is told in two ways that feel by turns overlong and undercooked—until they add up to something unexpected and genuinely fascinating. The dominant thread suggests a seemingly conventional, multi-perspective third-person novel featuring braided backstories interspersed with a chronicle of deliberations among the atoll’s inhabitants about whether to approve the project. Another narrative runs in tandem: a first-person series of reflections on Todd’s life and work, provoked and also marred—in their undulance and ellipsism—by his diagnosis of the degenerative brain disease known as Lewy body dementia. “I’m suffering from what we computer folks call latency,” Todd observes early on. “Retreating into the past … as more recent months and years grow fuzzy.” Three emotions recur for Todd: his regret over the break with Rafi and (by extension) Ina, the only people he’s ever felt close to; his longing, as a Midwestern boy, for the ocean wonders he first read about in Evie’s best-selling book; and his self-satisfaction as a Big Tech visionary. (“I bent under the obligation to become the first person to reach the Future. And here I am, successful at last.”)

Where is Todd, exactly? Ostensibly, he’s living in a splendid isolation afforded by his extreme wealth while his slick minions press the people of Makatea to agree to the conglomerate’s offer of large-scale economic renewal—while also implying that they could just as easily ask inhabitants of another Pacific island. On Makatea, Rafi broods and minds the children, at least until he becomes very upset after learning about Todd’s involvement in the project; Ina makes a dramatic protest sculpture out of garbage, some of it found in the bodies of little birds; the other islanders debate their voting rights versus the rights of the surrounding marine life; and Evie, now in her 90s, visits like an ethereal, demure white sage, commanding credibility from the islanders because of her mystical relationship to sea creatures, which we hear about again and again (and again). Eventually, nearing total mental and physical breakdown, Todd makes a dramatic trip to Makatea to meet Rafi and Ina and Evie, in hopes of achieving a perfect confluence of his goals in the realms of business, relationships, and world-building.

Read: Going to extremes

If this all sounds like fantasy fiction for rich white people, that’s because it is. I’m not being a crank here, whining again about how Powers falls short of the great American masters of marine-life metaphors. I’m pointing, in fact, to a revelation near the very end of the novel, which discloses its stunning conceit. The spoiler is warranted here, because revealing Powers’s destination serves his potential readers by placing fewer demands on their patience than he does. Todd is in fact immersed in an AI-generated story, created by a successor version of his first major creation. In the first-person sections, set off in italics, he’s been speaking to the AI, not us, the whole time. He’s fed it as much material as he could, from memory and information, about Makatea and about himself, Rafi, Ina, and Evie. In turn, the AI has created for him the very story we’ve been reading, interleaved with his reflections. His success lies in crafting and reading an artificially constructed story that fulfills wishes, answers unmet needs, and resolves regrets that ring his actual life.

The AI-generated components are incoherent, clichéd, cloying, and condescending: confusing chronologies, stereotypes about the simple nobility of Makatea’s Indigenous people and the resilience of inner-city Chicagoans, the sacral grandeur of animal and technological sentients. But suddenly, all of that makes sense, because the author has constructed a Powersian hall of mirrors: a novel that imagines what a novel might look like if it were composed by an AI developed by a misanthropic genius loner.

Ingenious tricks and clever devices abound in Powers’s fiction, but never before with the provocative implications of the turn in Playground. The novel offers a superb reversal of the scaled-up scavenging normative to AI art, but more than that, Playground challenges the readership—both admirers and critics—that Powers’s past work has created. Will true believers in Powers’s literary-ethical divinity feel betrayed by the late revelation, given their sincere investment in the story? Will they not only be moved by a fairy tale machined for a big, bad tech guy, the toughest of antiheroes to side with, but also believe that a nonhuman intelligence can capably capture and compel their imaginations? I hope so, inasmuch as this would lead to an intellectual reckoning of a different order than the surface expectation—that Powers’s latest novel simply teaches us that plastics are bad and Pacific Islanders are good. Moreover, reading Powers in this more difficult, demanding way affirms the imperative that Literature—recalcitrant in its ideas, characters, and storylines—should invite and sustain more of and from its readers.

In the end, Playground is exactly what I’d presumed it wasn’t: difficult, ambiguous, and resistant to au courant notions, all while trafficking in such ideas with deceptive coolness and ease. The novel exposes our dependency on fiction that promises morally clear accounts of our right-ordered relationship to animals, nature, each other, technology, literature—and to story itself.

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