One of the more reliable ways to hype a forthcoming novel by someone born and raised in the US is to suggest that, in its scope and breadth, it emerges as a “great American novel”. If certain writers are lucky (and talented) enough, they will manage to produce one of these in their careers – Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, for example, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.
Richard Powers, on the other hand, just seems to knock one out after the other. His latest, Playground, his 14th, isn’t merely a great American novel, but a magnificent one. Powers has long been an author gravely concerned with humanity’s destruction of the planet; his magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel The Overstory was about the importance of trees. Now he dives deep beneath the Pacific Ocean to reveal just how careless we have been in preserving it.
Playground, which was longlisted for this year’s Booker, revolves around four separate narratives: two childhood friends, Todd and Rafi, who bond over boardgames at school before one of them grows up to develop tech that will change the way we live, while the other reverts to nature; Ina, a young woman living in naval bases across the Pacific; and Evie, a nonagenarian diver whose dream it is to have her final resting place in deep sea.
If initially there seems to be a lot of explanatory scene-setting, this is because Powers is in no hurry. He’s building up a head of steam. The French Polynesian island of Makatea is the proposed location for an American corporation to create “humanity’s next adventure: floating, autonomous cities on the open sea”. The island, Powers writes, “started out as a flat-top seamount hidden for an eon beneath the ocean’s surface”. Fifty million years later, humans have come along and ruined everything.
The fact that its remaining 82 residents are unsure whether to greenlight the project is stalling things. Gradually an increasingly gripping narrative emerges. Todd and Rafi’s adult lives converge and fray; Ina strays further south; and Evie writes a wildly successful book about the wonders of the seabed. Slowly, these four lives drift inexorably towards one another.
For a book that runs to 380 pages, it can often feel twice as long, but in the best possible way. Powers tracks each character over many years of health and happiness, then illness and impending mortality, and what it means to be human on a dying planet. He is brilliant on the complications of friendship, and some of the passages in which Evie dives deep are incandescently beautiful.
“The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs,” he writes. “She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounted up in pinnacles, domes, turrets and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see. The reef boiled over with the real purpose, a billion different psychedelic emissions, all dependent on each other.”
I cannot remember a novel whose latter stages I have read quite as slowly as this, not simply to stretch out the reading experience, but also to make sure I understood precisely what it was Powers – always a super-smart, tricksy writer – was revealing through a series of late-stage, jaw-dropping revelations.
This is fiction that requires patience, then pays off handsomely. It browbeats, but with conviction. In a word: wow.
Published by Hutchinson Heinemann on 26 September, £20