“Day and Night, the final pages of “Clearly It is Ocean” haunted me. I couldn’t stop rereading them. In the last chapter, the woman I crushed on with all my ten-year-old heart told of a research trip she had made off the coast of Eastern Australia. She stopped one day in the middle of a dive to watch a giant cuttlefish near the mouth of its den This tentacled mollusk, kin to squid and octopus, was performing a long, wild color dance for no one.”
Those are some lines from Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers' newest book Playground. This is a book about the ocean and a woman who spent her life exploring it and about three college friends, two of whom spent hours playing board games. One of them became a billionaire developing a sophisticated AI program called Playground.
The novel weaves in and out of years and the lives of these four main characters. Along the way the book reveals the wonders of the creatures who inhabit the ocean. At the end of the book, the characters meet on Makatea, a raised coral atoll that is part of French Polynesia. This is an extraordinary story with great detail and deep character development.
Powers is such a talented writer it’s hard to do justice to his work. Just know that as soon as you finish this book, you’ll want to start it again. The book jacket says it best, “Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity.”
If you want to read something by one of today’s best writers, then you must read Playground by Richard Powers.
