Last night, I finished reading Richard Powers' Playground.
I'm a fan of Powers. Prior to completing Playground, I've read Orfeo, The Overstory, and Bewilderment, his three previous novels. I had high hopes for Playground but have to admit I was disappointed. It never seemed to settle on a theme, and the story meandered as if it were written in serial format, making it up as it went along.
Perhaps I was misled by the prepublication publicity. The novel was promoted as being to the oceans what Overstory was to trees. And while the ocean was frequently discussed, the book was almost equally about strategy games like chess and go, AI, and Chicago. You can almost sense Powers' interest wandering as the book proceeds. It feels like he started wanting to write a grand epic about the wonders and majesty of the ocean, got distracted by Polynesian life, started some deep thoughts about games and the people that play them, and later the rise of the computer age leading to the advent of AI. And then at times, it was like, "Oh, yeah, this is my ocean book," and back beneath the sea we went.
Near the end, he has one character write a book about the ocean, and he uses the opportunity describing that fictional book to do a data dump on all the research he must have accumulated on the oceans in the course of writing Playground.
Perhaps my experience suffered from high expectations. Had this been the first novel I read by some previously unknown-to-me author, I might have enjoyed it more.
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