South Sea adventure

It is sobering to think that, if he continues to train at his current rate, Richard Powers may one day be able to generate a text all but indistinguishable from an actual work of literary fiction. Don’t be overly alarmed: it’s a way off yet. At various points in Playground, Powers’s fourteenth novel and his second since his Pulitzer prize-winning eco-dystopian epic The Overstory (2018), it is suggested that the book we are reading is indeed the product of a large language model developed by one of the main characters, whose reality, within the novel’s fictional parameters, is thus thrown into question. Did Todd create the AI or did the AI imagine him, along with all the events he describes? As a piece of metafictional mischief, it is both amusing enough per se and tidily mimetic of the novel’s larger preoccupation with machine learning, even if the chief effect is an unintentionally ironic acknowledgement of Powers’s abiding flaw as a novelist – his ability to draw on and manipulate vast quantities of information only to churn out something not quite recognizably human.

Powers sets his new novel principally by or beneath the ocean: the understory to his overstory. Evie Beaulieu, a French-Canadian oceanographer now in her nineties, has been in her element since the age of twelve, when her father, a liquid-air engineer, threw her into a Montreal test pool with a prototype aqualung strapped to her back. She has been “diving for longer than all but a few people on Earth”. But her amphibiousness comes at a cost: as her childhood enthusiasm leads, over the mid-century boom years of saturation diving, to an illustrious career as a marine scientist, she becomes increasingly averse to dry land, at the expense of her ineffectual if heroically patient husband Bart and their twins Danny and Dora. Her name is perhaps a touch overdetermined: Evie is an innocent, forever “twelve inside”, an Eve in her subaquatic beau lieu, and with no particular need of an Adam.

Ina Aroita is a military brat, born in Honolulu and raised on naval bases in Guam and Samoa. As a new graduate art student at the University of Illinois – the first time she has “set foot on a continent” – she meets Rafi Young, a brilliant if self-sabotaging literature major from a troubled background in the impoverished Near West Side of Chicago. Rafi’s best friend and fellow board game enthusiast is Todd Keane, a computer whizz who will go on to make his fortune as the creator of Playground, a sort of gamified hybrid of Facebook and Reddit. Their paths diverge, before meeting again decades later on the remote Polynesian island of Makatea – or appearing to, with the caveat that Todd, by implication the presiding narratorial presence, has by this stage either developed early-onset dementia, been replaced by an AI, or both. Figments or not, Ina, Rafi and the improbably well-preserved nonagenarian Evie are holding out against a cabal of Peter Thiel-like libertarian tech billionaires, intent on using Makatea as a base for the construction of a series of floating tax havens.

The precise nature of Todd’s connection to the island, though insistently hinted at, is left unclear until late in the story, by which time, of course, enough has been done to destabilize his narratorial reliability that we are left in doubt as to the island’s or its inhabitants’ reality. This gives the scenes set on Makatea a dreamlike quality corresponding, rather pleasingly, to the serene, otherworldly descriptions of Evie’s deep-water dives, and gathering in intensity towards a denouement whose Bond-style preposterousness is mitigated, somewhat, by the fact that it may be the hallucination either of a diseased intelligence or an AI’s best shot at impersonating one. Such playfulness may indeed draw organically from the novel’s conceptual groundwater – Todd cuts his teeth at university working on early symbolic artificial intelligence, leading to heated debates with Rafi about the validity of computer-generated art – but the objection remains that Powers is strong on ideas and weak on their correlatives. His novels are show builds, sturdily constructed but as yet uninhabitable. The questions Playground poses – can AI be reconciled with human creativity? Must technological advance always come at the expense of the environment? – use its characters mechanistically, as conduits for their own exploration, with the result that said characters frequently appear as puppets for the novel’s rigid binaries, assuming exactly the positions you might expect them to take. Todd thinks that AI is cool. Rafi the rebel poet thinks it poses an existential threat to humanity. This opposition is recapitulated to an almost comical degree in the contrasting sensibilities of Bart and Evie’s twins. Danny is emphatically left-brained, a budding engineer who looks out on his mother’s beloved Pacific and imagines “outposts on giant pylons rising above the waves, cities in bubble domes colonizing the coral-encrusted ocean bottom”. Dora just listens to the waves and the seagulls and enters an artsy trance: “What are they saying, Mama? What does it mean?” So the boys and IT wizards are tech-utopians; the girls (and effeminate poets) are all dreamy and into the ineffable mysteries of nature. Powers’s characters are suffocated by his schema: they have no life independent of the positions they represent.

The best sequences in Playground are those set underwater, as Evie sinks “face-upward through the bright top layers of the photic zone” into a sea world Powers evokes with a terminological fidelity that (almost) never detracts from its wondrousness: very skilfully, we are made to feel the grace that Evie, habituated and scientifically minded as she is, experiences as sharply at ninety-two as she did as a teenager, diving near the Lachine Rapids off Montreal’s south shore. Off Makatea, she swims with Mobula birostris, a giant oceanic manta ray she has come to know as “the Loner”.

So stunning was the Loner’s silhouette as he passed overhead that Evelyne gasped into her air hose. Her gasp turned into bubbles that rose through the water and tickled the manta’s underside. The bubbles trickled upward into his gill slits.

The Loner ends up coughing Evie’s air bubbles through his “branchial filaments” along with tiny “stuck particles”, sending the nearby cleaner shrimp and wrasse “into an orgy of feeding”. The finickiness of the idiom – “gill slits”, “branchial filaments” – is doubly defrayed, first as the free-indirect co-option of a specialized vocabulary that would come as natural to Evie, and second, more importantly, by the closeness of the noticing. We are the more immersed, as readers, by the focal shift from oceanic vastness to the millimetric detail of Evie’s air bubbles filtered through a sea creature’s gill slits. Evie’s wonder – her gasp of awed biophilia – is reified by the water into a means of strange physical intimacy. Later in the book, in a flashback to the high point of her career as a marine photographer, Evie’s dive deep inside the wreck of a Japanese carrier transport, sunk by the US navy during the Pacific War, and now colonized by black coral and “spectral sponges in crazy numbers”, is rendered with a similarly oneiric specificity.

These sequences – as well as his terra firma disquisitions on AI – are so at ease in their own erudition that it would be unfair to accuse Powers of the kind of frantic Googleism or Wikipedantry that besets so much contemporary fiction. The knowledge on display has the same quality of casual assimilation that used to be admired in John Updike, as in, for instance, the divagations on particle physics in Roger’s Version (1986). The difference lies in Updike’s ability to put abstruse or technical domains of knowledge at the service of more novelistically personal concerns. It is no accident that the most successfully drawn character in Playground should be the one insured by her life’s calling against human interaction. Back on land, in the company of Bart and her children, Evie pales, like a pebble brought home from the beach. When in old age Bart falls ill, Powers can only wring sentiment from his and Evie’s parting, so bland and undeveloped is their characterization as a couple.

Todd, likewise, is anaemically sketched, prone, despite his avowed intelligence, to a level of banality and cliché (“the penny dropped … I sat there, watching the adventure unfold as if the dice were still being cast”) that might be characteristic of the side he takes in the two-cultures debate – Todd’s comment comes after Rafi and Ina drag him to a student production of The Tempest – but again relies, complacently, on an off-the-shelf conception of the Zuckerbergian tech nerd as affectless automaton. When Ina first arrives in the Midwest, she watches, awestruck, as “bits of eggshell fall from the sky to make the Earth”. A Pacific Islander amazed by the snow? A different writer might have shied from the stereotype; Powers singles it out, in a prefatory mini-chapter, as a vignette of special significance, then revisits it 200 pages later. Some of the prose is so stiff as to read like the notes you might make before actually writing a sentence. Here is Didier Turi, the mayor of Makatea, rejecting the idea of masturbation after his wife Roti goes off sex: “And he would not make himself come, like some crazy person living in a self-invented fantasy, faithless to her anyway, in his mind”. Elsewhere, combing the tide pools west of Malibu, Bart and Evie watch hermit crabs “pursuing their theft-driven home upgrades”. Powers fluffs his modest gag (“home upgrades”) with word choices (“pursuing”, “theft-driven”) so unidiomatic as to read like bad translation.

If there is a controlling metaphor in Playground, an organizing idea, it is play, linking Todd and Rafi’s devotion to the Chinese board game Go (“This game is to chess what singing is to sucking your teeth”) to the perpetual probing iterations of machine learning and the “complex codes of color and movement” Evie observes on her diving expeditions – displays, as put on by the dancing, chameleonic cuttlefish she encounters off the east coast of Australia, too strange and beautiful to be explained away as species competition. “Some kind of grammar infused these florid patterns, a rich syntax and semantics with inscrutable rules and moves, and while Evie could decode none of it, she knew it meant something … The cuttlefish was putting on a play”. And so is Richard Powers, but by a grammar too rigid to move us.

Nat Segnit’s most recent book is Retreat: The risks and rewards of stepping back from the world, 2021

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