One of the more reliable ways to hype a forthcoming novel by someone born and raised in the US is to suggest that, in its scope and breadth, it emerges as a “great American novel”. If certain writers are lucky (and talented) enough, they will manage to produce one of these in their careers – Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, for example, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Richard Powers, on the other hand, just seems to knock one out after the other.
His latest, Playground , his 14th, isn’t merely a great American novel, but a magnificent one. Powers has long been an author gravely concerned with humanity’s destruction of the planet; his magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel The Overstory was about the importance of trees. Now he dives deep beneath the Pacific Ocean to reveal just how careless we have been in preserving it.
Playground , which was longlisted for this year’s Booker , revolves around four separate narratives: two childhood friends, Todd and Rafi, who bond over boardgames at school before one of them grows up to develop tech that will change the way we live, while the other reverts to nature; Ina, a young woman living in naval bases across the Pacific; and Evie, a nonagenarian diver whose dream it is to have her final resting place in deep sea. Read Next Intermezzo is Sally Rooney's best book yet If initially there seems to be a lot of explanatory scene-setting, this is because Powers is in no hurry. He’s building up a head of .