Book excerpt: “Playground” by Richard Powers

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“Playground” (W.W. Norton), the latest novel by Richard Powers (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Overstory”), explores artificial intelligence and the race to save the oceans. Its multi-track story concerns a computer genius looking back at his life; an oceanographer recounting her love for sea creatures; and the residents of a tiny South Pacific island who’ve been offered a fortune by a shadowy group of tech billionaires.

Read an excerpt below. 

“Playground” by Richard Powers

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I’m suffering from what we computer folks call latency. Retreating into the past, like my mother did in her last years. This curse doesn’t always run in families, but sometimes it does. Who knows? Maybe my mother had it, too. Maybe the undiagnosed disease lay behind the accident that killed her.

As more recent months and years grow fuzzy, the bedrock events of my childhood solidify. Closing my eyes, I can see my first bedroom high up in the crow’s nest of our Evanston Castle in more detail than memory should permit: the student desk cluttered with plastic sharks and rays. The shelf of deep-sea books. The globe of a fishbowl filled with guppies and swordtails. The closet piled high with masks and snorkels and dried sea fans and chunks of coral and fish fossils from the Devonian Period, bought at the Shedd Aquarium gift shop.

On the wall above my bed hung a framed article from the Trib dated January 1, 1970: “First in Line for the New Decade.” I must have read that thing a thousand times, growing up. The black-and-white picture showed me, newborn Todd Keane, delivered in Saint Francis Hospital, Evanston, in the barest fraction of a second after midnight, staring at the camera with infant bafflement, trying to focus on the great mystery looming up in front of me.

Mr. First in Line: My parents called me that for years. It put some pressure on me when I was small. An only child, I took the title and the birthright seriously. I bent under the obligation to become the first person to reach the Future.

And here I am, successful at last.

My mother didn’t want to wreck her perfect body with childbirth, but my father needed someone he could play chess with at home, any time of day or night. I don’t know how they settled the matter. Maybe rock, paper, scissors. Feats of skill. Moot court or Oxford-style debate. Maybe I was born by a roll of the dice.

One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden. I was a precocious four-year-old when I realized that my parents were locked in a contest to inflict as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the line into fatality—just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement that only rage could bring. It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients.

My father was a quick man, so quick that he found much of the rest of the world tedious. He worked in the pit at the Chicago Board of Trade, in the age before electronic trading. A warrior of the open-outcry system, he stood in the heart of the octagon as the furious waves of capitalism crashed all around him. Casting a cold eye on others’ fears and turning them to a profit, his brain knew no difference between thrill and stress. Keeping his head while others swelled and broke, making and losing insane amounts of money all with little twists of the palm and flicks of the finger (backed up by delirious screaming), had long ago flooded his cortex with so many surging neurotransmitters that he could no longer function without constant low-level threats to his well-being. These my homemaker mother dutifully supplied.

Other doses took the form of a souped-up 450SL convertible, a Cessna Skyhawk that he kept at Midway and liked to take out in rough weather, and a mistress who carried an unregistered Smith & Wesson Model 61 in her Louis Vuitton leather shoulder pochette.

My mother was a closet romantic. When she found out about my father’s secret life, she hired a private detective to hunt down a boy who had doted on her at New Trier High School and who went on to play utility infielder in the Cubs’ farm system for several years before buying into an AMC dealership in Elk Grove. She was constantly breaking up and furiously reuniting with this man in semi-public places, all but begging my father to put an end to it. My father rose lovingly to the bait, time and again.

Don’t get me wrong: If being rich meant having feckless parents, I accepted that. I loved being rich. The consolation prizes were many and outstanding. But I hated my father for betraying my mother, and I hated my mother for betraying me. I wasn’t old enough yet to know how to pretend that everything would be fine. The secret seemed to be to find some other place to live.

I found that place under Lake Michigan. When my mind raced and the future rushed at me with knives, the only thing that helped was looking out from the castle and seeing myself walking across the bottom of the lake.

All dramas sounded muffled, under the water. I knew this from summers on the Lee Street and Lighthouse Beaches. All friends and foes looked fluid and subdued, crawling through liquid resistance with a languid blue-green cast. On the floor of the lake, there were no people. I couldn’t imagine a better place to live.

From “Playground” by Richard Powers, published by W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright 2024 by Richard Powers. All rights reserved.

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“Playground” by Richard Powers

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For more info:

• “Playground” by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton­), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats
• Richard Powers (Official site)