By admin 
FICTION
Playground
Richard Powers
Hutchinson Heineman, $34.99
Although the thing that sticks in most people’s minds is Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The story are the trees, then the book could just as easily be read as a story about computers and artificial intelligence.
That’s not surprising: Powers worked as a computer programmer early in his career, and computing is a recurring theme in his fiction, woven into novels as diverse as Galatea 2.2, The Goldbug Variations, Plowing the dark and, most recently, Bewilderment.
Powers’ enchanting new novel amply shares this duality. Although on the surface it is a book that tries to do the same for the oceans The story did for trees, Playground is also focused on the transformative possibilities of artificial intelligence.
Like most of Powers’ novels, Playground is intricately structured, interweaving the stories of a sprawling cast of seemingly unconnected characters. In the center of the book are four people. The first three are a trio of friends: Todd Keane, Rafi Young and Ina Aroita. Todd, who narrates much of the novel, is the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman, blessed with an ability to understand math and computer science. Rafi is the mixed-race child of a black firefighter and a Korean bus driver with an extraordinary talent for reading and a fascination with literature.
The two meet as teenagers at a school for the gifted, where they bond over games: first chess and later, and more importantly, the extraordinary complexity of the ancient Chinese game Go. Their friendship lasts until graduate school, where they meet Ina, the artist daughter of a Hawaiian naval officer and a Tahitian flight attendant, who becomes the love of both their lives.
By the time the novel begins, the two men have long been estranged. Rafi found happiness too late with Ina and their two adopted children on Makatea, in French Polynesia. Todd, on the other hand, has become one of the richest people in the world, the billionaire and founder of the social platform that gives the novel its name, although all that wealth isn’t enough to stop the rapid unraveling of his mind after a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).
Author Richard Powers.Credit: David Levenson/Getty
The fourth character is Evie Beaulieu, a French-Canadian marine biologist and ocean adventurer who is more than a little reminiscent of Sylvia Earle (although the novel complicates that easy identification by giving the real Earle a brief cameo). Evie learns to dive as a teenager in 1947 (her father is a friend of Jacques Cousteau), and the experience transforms her, offering a way to escape her troublesome body and fueling an obsession that will define her entire life.