The ocean’s infinite game

Midway through Playground, oceanographer Evelyne (Evie) Beaulieu dives off Truk Atoll in the central Pacific in order to photograph the debris of a sunken World War II ship. Hundreds of feet underwater, Evie is among the first to behold the several tons of crumpled battleship steel, relics of a bygone war now turned into “the largest man-made reef on the planet.” Where before there was only smooth ocean floor, Evie observes how microbial life found a new place to make a home and took over: “Life covered every inch of the twisted surfaces and turned them into high-rise dwellings.. . . The wreckage of war had seeded the greatest nursery she’d ever seen.” The corpses of sailors were similarly overtaken by beautiful coral formations, part of a “continuing conversion” into an arresting, almost beatific vision of life after life. Writing home to her mother, who still grieves the death of her brother in the Pacific War, Evie reports what she saw: “I can tell you that if any place on this entire planet can be called paradise, Uncle Philip is in it. Heaven is growing out of him.”

Playground is the third consecutive novel written by Richard Powers as a love letter to planet Earth, addressed to the hubristic, human-centered story that has come to define (and even create) the Anthropocene. The Overstory (2018) considers the world from the perspective of trees and the awe-­inspiring networks of life beneath earth’s soil. Bewilderment (2021) centers on the vastness of the cosmos and the possibilities of life beyond Earth. And now Playground invites us to contemplate the ocean, home to 99 percent of Earth’s biosphere. From the vantage point of these vast, watery depths that teem with primordial life, we mere land dwellers reside in “the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers . . . ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.”

While the ocean is the main stage, it’s the human drama that anchors Playground’s narrative. Four disparate characters’ lives offer lenses into the grand, dynamic story of the planet in ways both poignant and surprising. Through the lives of Evie, Rafi Young, Todd Keane, and Ina Aroita, we are given players within Earth’s playground who find comfort and identity in the protection, wonder, and mystery of water. Unmoored and adrift in the world due to various life circumstances, each becomes caught up in the beautiful, brutal game of life itself in the hopes of redeeming their own experiences of isolation, loss, suffering, and death.