I loved this book so much I read it twice in succession. As is typical with Powers, there’s a lot going on here. His usual themes, surrounding technology, art, and the natural world, are in full form, coming together in a multi-threaded and highly rewarding character driven plot. This story is especially current and relevant to me as he grapples with things that cut deep in my own life.
Like Powers, I have a background in technology. I’ve been programming computers since I was 10 years old. And most of that long life has been a sort of love affair with what Steve Jobs called “a bicycle for the mind” — the ability for computers to empower and extend human potential across a broad spectrum of fields. And it is only more recently, in the last ten years or so, that I’ve begun to doubt that vision. Or at least grapple with very difficult questions around how that kind of power can be used, at the same time, to undermine human expression. I could go on all day about this but I’ll just say Playground captures this intricate and almost inscrutable question through story and narrative device in a way I found deeply moving, concerning, and honest.
Spoilers ahead…
In Playground, Powers takes the idea of the unreliable narrator to some kind of meta-level. The narrator is entirely reliable, and while he is clear about what he is doing from the start, it is a little hard to grasp until late in the story. I was gobsmacked by this. We have in this fictional universe both fictional-fact and fictional-fiction, each serving a purpose, and each calling into question the idea of story as a means of understanding the world. We know the story we just read is “untrue” even within its own fictional universe, and we’re not quite sure how to tease out the factual. We’re not even sure if the meta-fiction is a net good or a net bad. Rafi planted an idea in our minds in the early chapters and it is only in the end, long after he is dead—long after we have supposed he is not—that we realize we have become unwitting participants in the game he imagined. We have been manipulated (or graced?) by Keane’s deceit (or gift?). It is a remarkable work of storytelling, and one that only really works in the current moment of early “AI”. An absolutely genius approach to dealing with “large language models” narratively.
In some sense what Powers is doing here is probing his own role as a storyteller—a person who tells big Truths through little lies and hopes along the way for somethig like purpose. And he’s probing his role as a collator, refiner, and mixer of other people’s ideas and discoveries. In a very real and rewarding way, the acknowledgments after the “conclusion” of the novel become a part of the novel itself, and I think they were positioned this way intentionally.
Playground is a true work of genius. I’m reminded of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, perhaps the last book I read that genuinely shocked me structurally.
Richard Powers proves himself once again a master craftsman and an absolute gift to the literary universe.