"Playground" | Reviewed by William Winkler

American writer Richard Powers has published 14 novels, including 2019’s “Overstory,” which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Powers’s novels deal with technology and scientific pursuit, blended with observation of the human condition.

His most recent novel, “Playground,” follows the lives of four primary characters; Todd, the son of seemingly affluent parents from the northern suburbs of Chicago; Rafi, a brilliant child of the south Chicago ghetto; Evelyne whose Canadian father developed one of the earliest underwater breathing devices; and Ina, a gifted artist whose life intertwines with the other three.

The primary setting of the narrative is the tiny atoll of Makatea, one of the many islands comprising French Polynesia. The atoll is unique in that it has potable drinking water. From the early 20th century until the 60s Makatea was heavily mined for its rich deposits of phosphates, critical in the production of fertilizer. As a mining colony Makatea was home to over 3000 people and possessed the amenities of much larger islands in the south Pacific.

With the closing of the mines, the population dwindled to fewer than 100 souls. Rafi and Ina are permanent residents, raising their two adopted children and teaching in the island’s tiny school. Evelyne, who has devoted her life to diving and oceanographic research, has come to the island to study one last ecosystem. And Todd, who has grown immensely wealthy by developing an online service called Playground, is about to visit the island in a yacht crewed solely by artificial intelligence. Todd’s visit is as representative, and principal stockholder, of a consortium proposing to buy the island and turn it into the base of operations for a network of floating cities able to operate outside the regulations of government interference.

Powers’s novel contains rich descriptions of undersea life as he points out the destructive nature of climate change and its effects on the oceans of the world as well as the countless organisms that call the oceans home. His characters, each in his or her own way, are deeply affected also, and it is the course of their lives that moves the story briskly ahead.

A plot twist late in the novel’s course casts each character’s story into question. But the twist does not negate the novel’s central premise, that each character is a participant in a game of their own choosing, each defining his or her own unique playground.

Buy the book.