NPR: Richard Powers dives into the depths of the ocean | Entertainment

“If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play,” remarks a trailblazing oceanographer in Richard Powers' Playground. Evelyne Beaulieu is one of a number of sensible characters in the novel who eagerly strategy their work every single day with the pleasure of “a babe in Toyland.” During a long time exploring the ocean ground and enjoying “hide-and-seek with octopuses and tag with pygmy seahorses,” the Montreal-born diver feels as if she's been “set loose in the greatest playground any child had ever seen.” But she can be involved by the modifications she's witnessed over the years — together with reefs and species which have been decimated.

Powers, whose most up-to-date novel was the devastating Bewilderment, a few widowed father and his neurodivergent son, as soon as once more nimbly hopscotches between the wonders of nature and the marvels and risks of cutting-edge science and know-how. Play runs via Playground like a college of fish — however one chased by the menace of disasters wrought by human habits and local weather change.

Where The Overstory, Powers' 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winner, addressed the destruction of forests, Playground focuses on the perils to oceans, which cowl 71% of Earth's floor and home 99% of the world's biosphere. Powers makes clear that whereas we people have made this planet our amusement park, we've got not all the time taken correct care of our toys.

Throughout a profession that spans 40 years and 14 novels, Powers has heightened our consciousness by creating sensible, sympathetic (however under no circumstances excellent) characters, many of them scientists and techies who grapple with these severe points. In Playground, he dives into a number of seminal relationships wherein lifelong buddies and lovers battle movingly to climate the challenges of divergent priorities.

The novel's title, Playground, doubles as the identify of a fantastically profitable, interactive on-line social platform, a form of “communal proving ground” developed by Todd Keane, a tech wizard who, confronted with quickly progressing dementia, relays the story of his life to a listener whose id is revealed late in the e-book.

Todd describes himself as a person puzzled by individuals and their feelings however enraptured by strategic video games and laptop programming from a younger age. His privileged however sad boyhood in Evanston, Ill., was darkened by the relentless “war games” between his sparring mother and father and pressures from his pushy father. He says he discovered welcome escapes in chess, laptop video games, and Evelyne Beaulieu's widespread e-book, Clearly It Is Ocean, his self-selected reward for beating his father in a best-of-five chess match at age 10. For years, till the alluring prospect of laptop programming's life-changing potentialities overtook him, he was smitten with the thought of turning into an oceanographer.

But Todd's biggest escape was his friendship with one other misfit at a Jesuit highschool for presented youngsters in Chicago. Rafi Young, a proficient poet and bookish Black scholarship pupil, was additionally a refugee from a troubled residence. The boys linked over chess and later the historical sport of Go, and remained shut via faculty, although the cultural gulfs that divided them — which Powers captures with sensitivity — might by no means be absolutely bridged.

Frontloaded with quite a bit of data in its opening chapters, this meaty novel begins slowly and confusingly. But relaxation assured that the tales about Powers' trio of distinctive outliers come collectively progressively. Two characters — Todd and Rafi — hail from Powers' residence state, Illinois, and, like the writer, attend the University of Illinois-Urbana. Two characters — Evelyne and Todd — find yourself based mostly in California, face imminent mortality with aplomb, and specific their want to be buried at sea.

The tiny island of Makatea, in the 1,200-mile-long archipelago of French Polynesia, performs an outsize and initially baffling function in the novel. Makatea was devastated by phosphorus mining and hydrogen bomb testing in the twentieth century, leaving islanders and the native financial system “concussed by history.” Now, the remaining inhabitants is confronted with a fraught determination: Should they settle for a pitch by rich American buyers to make use of Makatea as a base for a seasteading enterprise — the creation of floating cities — with the promise of jobs and prosperity? Tensions mount as the islanders debate the proposal, posing inquiries to an AI assistant known as Profunda, offered by the builders. “Better poor fishermen than rich factory workers,” conclude two males who eke out a residing of their small boat. We progressively perceive who's behind the venture and what's at stake.

As regular, Powers' descriptions leap out of the water. Makatea, which “rose like a hatbox floating on the waves,” was chosen as a result of it's the least probably atoll to be inundated by rising seas.

There are some audible creaks in the storytelling equipment as Powers labors to carry his a number of narrative strands collectively. Still, he manages to drag off a sly — and disturbing — twist in the novel's profoundly affecting climax.
 
Playground joins a welcome surge in current fiction that includes feminine scientists, together with not simply Powers' Overstory however Martin MacInnes' In Ascension, Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry, and Francesca Segal's Welcome to Glorious Tuga, which can be set on a distant island. But the biggest takeaway from the novel, which brims with love for humanity and the planet, is that whereas change is inevitable, the fragile enchantments of life — underwater and on land — are price savoring and saving.