Richard Powers’s Playground is structured around three intertwined narratives – the origin story of Todd Keane, a tech entrepreneur, and the formative experiences of his youth, the political drama of the island community of Makatea on the brink of being pulled back into the orbit of late capitalism after being decimated by extractive colonialism in the previous century, and the story of Evie Beaulieu, a diver who struggles to balance her passion for the sea with her relationships. Multiple narratives can be challenging but this novel does a nice job driving the plot forward and keeping the reader guessing at what’s coming next.

The titular theme is interesting but at times felt a bit heavy-handed, from the opening pages that invoke play as the motive force of a Polynesian creation myth to the childhood games that Todd played with his father. At one point we get a reference (maybe a quote) from Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a book that I had on my shelf without reading for a decade or so in my twenties. The thematic approach in literature can sometimes feel like a kind of ritual homage to such-and-such underappreciated feature or facet. In Playground, I appreciated the elevation of the theme but sometimes the novel feels a bit heavier and more serious than it should for a book focusing on play.

Perhaps the discordance between heaviness and play is part of the point. We get to the central conflict, where Todd and Rafi have a falling out about what exactly? Rafi gets stuck when writing his thesis, making draft after draft without finding anything that is good enough. Is this perfectionism itself a form of play or is it the opposite of play, a seriousness that makes it impossible to write? When Ina and Todd share a moment of concern (which has an air of intimacy) about Rafi and Todd shares some details about Rafi’s past, a rift is created between them. Rafi feels the need to control the way the story about his traumatic past is narrated. It’s understandable that he would feel betrayed but as the book develops, I had trouble staying with Rafi’s resentment. Did it feel unrealistic or just unsatisfying that a lifelong friendship would be destroyed in such a way? I suppose that friendships are ruined by all kinds of resentment, so it’s less a question of whether the rift was realistic as whether it felt like it had been manufactured by Powers to serve as the engine of the plot.

The italicized voice of Todd was not initially sympathetic to me. We know throughout the book that he is losing his mind to Lewy-body dementia, though his decline is more told than demonstrated. He coldly tells the story of how he made hundreds of millions of dollars building a platform that sounds something like a cross between Facebook and Reddit. Rafi’s contribution is the introduction of a form of currency, Playbucks, that limits approval of other people’s posts to a rationed amount. I appreciate that the introduction of scarcity makes the platform more compelling. Online “likes” would perhaps be more valuable if one could only click a “Like” button once per hour.

Despite my coldness to Todd, I found the final pages of the novel extremely moving, including the revelation about the nature of the narrative itself. Most of the book was constructed by an AI to give Todd a better sense of closure, to imagine a better life for Rafi that included reconciliation between the friends. I could imagine some readers might find the twist unsatisfying, but it felt appropriately playful to me. I loved that the novel form itself became a mode of grieving. On some level, it was sad that Todd had to turn to a bot to give him what he was unable to get in real life – connection with his friend. But I also felt like the novel served as a beautiful homage to his friend, a realization of Rafi’s dream of virtual immortality.

In some ways, Playground hearkens back to Permutation City, though in a much more emotionally impactful way. I have enjoyed many of Powers’s books but this one is my favorite.