Zibby interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author Richard Powers about his magisterial new novel, PLAYGROUND, where four lives come together on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where plans are being made to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. Richard delves into his characters, including two Chicagoans, a northside white kid named Todd and a southside Black kid named Rafi, who have a decades-long friendship shaped by shared trauma, intellect, competition, and love. He also talks about the issues of technological innovation, memory, and cultural preservation that his characters face. Finally, he shares the personal anecdotes that influenced the novel, including the loss of his sister.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Richard.

Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Playground. 

Richard: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for bringing me on. 

Zibby: It is not about going on a playground like kids and having fun. This is not like a mother's guide to, you know, raising your kids or anything like that.

But it does have the very, very fun name that evokes that sense of joy. 

Richard: Well, you know, it's funny because it was, uh, a strange joy to write the book. I've been writing for 40 years. I think it's my 14th novel, and I don't think I've ever had as much of a pure gift or as much pleasure in, in telling a story.

The way that things came together just seemed to drop out of the sky on me. So I'm very grateful for that. 

Zibby: Oh, wow. Which part dropped first? 

Richard: I guess the story of the boys friendship. So at the heart of this book, there's a slowly unfolding and long duration friendship between two Chicagoans, a northside white kid named Todd Keene and a southside black named Raffi Young.

And they go to an elite high school together. And they form a kind of odd couple friendship over competition, really, they both pride themselves on being special kinds of intellect and they are attracted to each other in a high school where not everybody understands them. Because they bond over intellect, they also bond over competitive games of intellect.

And so the friendship is this decades long push pull, where the two of them are always trying to outdo one another. 

Zibby: So both boys have very difficult family lives, lives in different ways, marked with loss and difficult parents and just a lot of strife and trauma both in different ways. 

Richard: Yeah. Another thing they bond over.

Zibby: Yes. And I feel like they both bond over education and reading. and story as a way to escape and, and heal in a way, right? They, you know, Raffi in particular is just, cannot believe that he has access in the library to all these stories. And it's just, he can take them and surround himself with the stories and that one loophole gets him into a little bit of trouble, but that he can always just dive in anywhere and then of course, Todd, Dives in, he's more interested in some of the, the water based, you know, worlds below. But both of them are diving deep into knowledge for its own sake, which leads the reader to feel incredibly smart, just even finishing this book. So thank you for that. 

Richard: You know, I, Percival Everett has this great line, he says, uh, I write novels to learn things.

Zibby: Hmm. 

Richard: I think that's always been true for me, too, and the novels that I, that I take the greatest pleasure out of as a reader also open up new worlds to me in terms of, you know, the, the, the, the milieu, the context, the, the things that the characters know about the world. That's always one of the great pleasures for me to become smarter, you know, vicariously down a road not taken in your own life.

Zibby: You teach us in the book about so many things, one of which is the effect on an island, an island life, an island economy, and, and all of that when sort of interlopers appear and need it for its own demands. And then of course, what happens in the rest of the world while this is going on and how those two kind of align and what happens to marine life and what happens, what the ripple effects are.

So can you speak a little bit to that particular plot line, which is sort of at the heart of, of where this novel takes us. 

Richard: You know, really, as you say, there, there really are three major plots. We've talked about the, the, the Raffy Todd friendship that, that's at the emotional heart of the book. The, the drama of the book, uh, concerns a small island in French Polynesia, about half the size of Manhattan that Been the object of colonial exploitation in the early 20th century, it was a phosphate island.

It was one of these three or four Pacific islands that had rich, rich deposits of phosphate. When the rest of the world discovered them, they immediately began consuming these islands almost wholesale. And, uh, shipping them out to other parts of the world to make fertilizer, to spread these islands, as it were, on the fields of the agricultural nations of the world.

Makatea in French Polynesia is one of these phosphate islands. They've, they've had a horrible, uh, traumatic episode with being eaten alive by the phosphate extraction industry, but they are now presented with a Another opportunity, a Silicon Valley consortium has singled them out as a possible launching spot for a project in seasteading, which is the creation of these floating autonomous cities that will somehow go out into international waters.

And, uh, be outside the jurisdiction of any nation state outside of all regulations and engage in new forms of government, new forms of production. That's the dream anyway. The 80 remaining people on this tiny island in French Polynesia have to decide Is this an opportunity? Is this the way we get our hospital built?

Is this the way that we finally get a school that can keep all our children here? Full employment for the island, possibly even newcomers? Or is it just another wave of colonialism? And so much of the book is, uh, an exploration of, uh, the way that these islanders react to this offer and the ultimate referendum that they take on, on their future.

Zibby: And, in addition, you have like a love triangle of sorts, right? You have someone who comes in and one of them falls immediately in love with and the other is just totally fascinated by and doesn't know how to put his words to it necessarily and knows how much he wants to be with this person too, but of course it's not, she's not for him.

And what happens when, uh, When that third person comes into a very close friendship, which, you know, I'm sure we've all had in various parts of our lives when, like, someone gets together with somebody who's just, I don't know, who throws everything up in the air. Where did that piece of this come from for you?

Richard: Well, a lot of the friendship comes out of personal experience. I'm myself from Chicago, and I was raised on the north side before I moved to Bangkok, Thailand at the age of 11. So I, in a way, this book, the kind of multiple plots of this book are psychoanalysis or attempts to kind of go back and re explore all the internal dynamics of my own mind.

Uh, so I have this link to the Pacific, but I also have this link to the American Midwest. The friendship, as you mentioned, is enormously complicated when the boys go from their elite high school down to college downstate Illinois, and they meet a Pacific Islander, you know, Ina Aruita, who is making her first sojourn on a continent ever.

And Rafi falls in love with her. So does Todd in a different way. And of course, this friendship that's been dominated by competition for all these years finds a new object to play their game over. As you say, the love triangle is pretty familiar to all of us in one way or another. It's a pretty standard trope in literary fiction.

And I think what I wanted to do in this story. Not only to destabilize the friendship, but to make it clear to each of these men how much they have depended on each other, how much wariness there is in the friendship, how very different their worldviews are. As you said, Rafi has sought solace and understanding through literature.

Todd has gone in the opposite direction. He's become a programmer. He's looking to reassert control over his own life through code. And this, you know, great digital revolution, which is underway over the course of their lifetimes. Ina is an artist, and she makes large scale constructions. And neither of these boys knows quite how What to do with her becomes a kind of, you know, a way of self understanding for them, or at least, you know, she brings into their lives the realization that they don't understand their own desires as well as they ought to.

Zibby: So interesting. And you spoke about the competition between the boys. Chess plays a big role, and I just love how they pass each other in the hallway at school and throw out a chess move, like L5 to whatever. I don't really play chess, but, you know, throwing out the moves so they can almost continue this, this game, even when they're not playing it, which is I just loved. 

Richard: Between them there's always the game and the meta game. They're playing a game with Jeff, but they're also testing each other's capacities. They're testing their ability to one up the other. And of course, this spills all, you know, this, this has ramifications for decades to come because ultimately, uh, Todd, Embarks on a programming project in the early days of the web that ends up exploding and turning him into a multimillionaire, but it's Rafi that has given him the idea, the necessity, the crucial component for what he needs to make this thing click.

End. The way in which that is given and then the way in which it is later contested is at the heart of the final reckoning of the friendship between these two boys. So, as you say, the, you know, there's the chess game and then there's the game in the hallways of who can hold the game in their mind long enough to best the other one.

But that again ripples upwards and outwards throughout the entire friendship and ends up having very large consequences for both of them in their lives. 

Zibby: I feel like one of the main themes of the book in a way is heartbreak, and I feel like that moment, the contesting of the idea and all of that and how, you know, not to give things away, but I feel like that is just another example of heartbreak that, that comes out of it.

The heartbreak of the destruction of this island and the friendship and the parents the loved ones. Like, there's a lot of heartbreak and destruction that we have to rebound from in this, in this story in a way. It's, it's quite sad in, in one lens, even though there is so much success in another. 

Richard: Oh, I like that a lot, you know, and I hadn't really invoked that word in my own mind to describe the dramatic end of the story. I, I've thought of it as a, as a love story in a way. Can you continue to love somebody who has cut you off? Can you acknowledge the love for a friend who In your own heart where that love has never been able to be acknowledged in the, in the real world of the friendship itself, there's the love of these 80 people on their island for the island and for their way of life.

And, and, you know, how, you know, how do you hold on to the love of a custom and love of a legacy and yet bring it forward into the world in a viable way. And, you know, there's a third frame of the book, which has to do with. An elderly diver from, uh, Canada. So, so a francophone girl in Montreal who is one of the very first ever to use the Aqualung because her father is involved in the creation of this device and she falls in love with the ocean.

And while she gets married and has a family and has children, she is constantly in the position of having to choose between Her commitment to her domestic situation and this love for three quarters of the planet that, uh, would seem very abstract to a lot of people, but to her is the heart and soul of who she is and what she wants from this life now, you know, calling it a novel about love and calling a novel about heartbreak might not be all that different.

You know, they are very Grossly wound up as literature has always shown us and to explore the ways in which love asks things from us That we can't satisfy Or that forever just be beyond Our ability to consummate or to know or to be at peace with maybe maybe that's it Maybe it's that moving target between love and heartbreak that we all have to operate in that the book explores. 

Zibby: It's so true interesting There's also, I mean, there's also sacrifice, another sort of node on the love, on the love, love, I don't know, timeline, if you will, or whatever.

I mean, you might say that the love between the boys was, has been compromised at times or is, is clouded by competition. And yet Rafi does the most selfless thing ever when Todd is really in need. And that, that moment was like incredibly telling. I mean, you can't, it's one thing to have some mercenary.

You know, demands later in life. But true love shows itself in, in big acts like that. 

Richard: Well, I do think that for me as a reader, and this is something that I've discovered as a writer over a long period of time, I'm kind of a slow study in some ways, , but it's what we give up. Mm-Hmm. That's a measure. Of what actually is most significant and meaningful to us.

And I think in terms, you know, when people say I cried over Booker, you know, I'll never forget this book. I was so deeply moved by the book. What moves us, I think, is people for a moment finding the capacity to be better than they ought to be able to be. That moment of sacrifice, that moment of acceptance of, of loss, but also that sort of moment where you just say all the same, nevertheless, you know, I need to do this, or it's, this is, you know, this is an essential part of who I am.

I think it's that, it's that transitory selflessness. Uh, in people who like, you know, all of us all the time need to further our own well being. That always makes me catch my breath as a reader. It's a tough book to talk about because there's a big reveal at the end, you know, there's so much that, you know, I wouldn't want to spoil.

It does open up and you know, there's, there's this way in which I think you're right. You, you, you think you're reading one kind of story. And then the scales kind of drop from your eyes and you realize, Oh, no, there's a, there's another sacrifice going on here. There's another self, you know, there's a, the, the story is actually very different than the stakes of the story are very different than what I thought they were when I was reading it.

Zibby: Absolutely. Not to mention that the whole thing is, is told by someone, I mean, maybe this is too much to give away, but. It will, okay. Well, the narrator, the, the state of the world for the narrator himself is another problem. Sort of plot line where you're racing against time in a way, which of course we all are.

Richard: Yeah, so, so, we know, I don't think, I don't think you've given anything away. I think it's not spoiling anything to say that much of the book is narrated by Todd as an older man. Right. And he, He's telling about the losses that he's incurred, you know, in, in, in over the course of this friendship and over the course of his professional success, but we also learned very early on that he has just received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia.

So he becomes almost. A doubly unreliable narrator. I mean, unreliable in the in in the literal sense of losing his own memory and losing his own ability to articulate and say who he is and hold on to his identity in himself, but. He's also a classic unreliable narrator. Let me tell you about my friend Rafi and what went wrong between us, and we're only ever getting Todd's part of the story, so we kind of have to infer, you know, what was going on in Rafi's mind all that time.

Zibby: So, where did some of this come from for you? I know it's somewhat, you know, location specific and all of that, but some of this loss and heartbreak, It has to come from some, somewhere, there's a lot of loss in the book. There's a lot of, there's darkness in, in, in getting through the, you know, bringing your head up above water again, we have to climb through that.

So just wondering, you know, to the extent you want to discuss where this, you know, what memories this draws on for you, even memories perhaps you want to forget, which is why Todd is forgetting them. 

Richard: Yeah, well such a raw and necessary question. There was both a personal loss and a collective loss, I think, that was hard, at the heart of creating the book.

Uh, the personal loss was the The death of my older sister, uh, about two and a half years ago. And I dedicate the book to her. I dedicate the book to two people, actually, my sister and, uh, my, my dear lifelong friend of many decades whose story formed the basis of a lot of Rafi's story, but my sister Peg had given me.

Uh, book on coral reefs when I was 10 years old and we were living on the north side of Chicago and, you know, I was kind of a precocious reader, I guess, and, you know, I would, I devoured this book and it's amazing pictures of these creatures from outer space, you know, psychedelic colors and forms that you just, you couldn't imagine, you know, were alive and, you know, I would look out my window Onto the, you know, endless suburban streets of North Chicago and look down at this book and, and just have this sense of, you know, there are two earths here and I can't put them together.

You know, I just can't figure out how they can coexist. The next year, my father, who was a school principal, decided to have this great adventure and he Pulled up stakes and he brought his family of seven to the other side of the world and I began a new life in Bangkok, Thailand. And that meant that at the age of 12, I was snorkeling in these same reefs that I had been reading about in an entirely abstract science fiction y way the year before.

When Peg died, of course, you know, I was flooded with the memories of the lifetime of, you know, the kind of closeness that you can only have with a sibling. End. I think there's something different about the death of a, of a sibling, you know, I've survived both my parents, many, many, you know, older friends and, but I think when a sister dies or a brother dies, your own mortality is so tied up in your realization of the, of your loss of, of this You know, this person who you can't be closer to, you know, there's just no, no one who shares your experiences in your genetics as closely as that person, but it was remembering her playfulness, you know, and just sort of puzzling.

Why did she give me this book in the first place? And it was so peg. It was so, it was so inexplicable. It was so capricious and, and, and it was her playfulness. That was at the heart of my wanting to write a book about the way in which play so totally dominates not only human culture, but the world of living things.

And, you know, that's what made me go back and remember this book that I had read in college, a classic book by Johan Huizinga called Homo Ludens. It was published in 1938. He was famous, a famous Dutch art historian. And he said, look, play. Culture grows out of play. Play is older than culture. It's older than the human species.

And sure enough, you know, the more I thought about it, the more ubiquitous this impulse is as a way of learning about the world. You know, evolution uses the play instinct to prepare Animals to exist in the world and you know, that lost of my, you know, of the most playful person in my life began to trigger in the thoughts of the kind of shared loss that we're all living in right now, which is the loss of so much of the abundance of the living world.

And I wanted to tell a story that addressed that, you know, that, that, that our sense of diminishment in this world. As so much of the diversity and vitality of the world that we inherited is, is being, is disappearing in the wake of our expansion. And I thought, is there a way of uniting that sense of personal loss with the larger sense of public loss, collective loss, in a way that doesn't Annihilate us.

Can we rethink who we are, what we're doing here, what our relationship to the more than human world is, what this unifying element of play is? Can we use it? Can we tell a story that will reduce our anxiety and our fear sufficiently for us to go on living productively? in this world. And that's what I tried to do in this novel.

Zibby: I'm so sorry about your sister. That's so sad. I'm sorry. She sounds amazing. 

Richard: She was. She was indeed. 

Zibby: Well, in analyzing play and, and all the things and in making Playground itself, you know, we dive into, More of this AI world that we're all sort of careening headlong into and how do we feel about the ability of people to, not people, but machines to sort of take over who we are and You know I think of this in like chat GPT and all these things like Can they really learn to be us?

Like do we need us if they learn to be us and speak like us and what does it even mean? And I feel like you know In addition to the 8, 000 other things the book brings up, it also leaves you with that as one of those giant questions of what have we created and have we doomed ourselves? 

Richard: Yeah. And I tried to deploy that question over a long period of time.

So another thing that Rafi and Todd are always going to war over is, you know, Todd's vision of the future where computers are going to be able to replace so much of what we think is uniquely human. And Rafi's saying, you know, they're never going to get there. My territory, right? They're never going to write poems.

They're never going to understand books. And, you know, in a heartbreaking way, I followed that story from its, you know, from its earliest forms when they're debating this in high school to the latest forms as Todd, as Todd is in his final days. And. able to claim one kind of victory, but also knowing in his heart that it's a loss and know that, you know, that, that complicated and fraught idea of, you know, what is it that makes us unique?

And are we making things that take away some of that uniqueness? And then now what do we do? How do we find personal meaning? How do we find creativity? And, you know, how, how do we propel ourselves in a productive and gratifying way in the world? If we're making things that can do everything that we can do better than we do it and that's, that's one of the real agonies at the heart of this story, but you know, I also situate this story, you know, in a, in a larger question that I've been writing about for at least the last couple of books in, in overstory and bewilderment.

And it's this, it's this theme of anti human exceptionalism. We have to start thinking about ourselves. In recent periods in human history, in the last several decades, maybe a century or more, we thought the story of life on earth is basically us and everything else is just here for our use. And, you know, we are really the heart and soul of what's happening on this planet and everything else is kind of sub chapter to us or, you know, an ancillary part of us.

And in these last three books, I think of them almost as a, as a. As a trilogy of sorts, but I'm saying is this, there's a different way of thinking about that question. And it's a way that probably is much more characteristic. of the way that most human beings in most part of the world have thought about that story for most of human history, which is no, we are a small part of a very large story, not the other way around.

And while we are terrified of the living world and have had somehow to have developed this culture that wants to dominate it and and take absolute control over it. And we are also terrified of these new kinds of beings that we're bringing about. They're going to resemble us much more closely than we're comfortable with.

Ultimately, what we have to do is find stories, find ways of Of making films, writing novels that reverse our sense of centrality. We have to join ourselves to a much, much larger way of thinking about. What life is and what life is doing. 

Zibby: It's funny. I'm reading um, the wild robot, the wild robot escapes by Peter Brown.

Have you read those? So my, my son is nine and he's like, mom, you have to read this. It's so good. Cause the movie's coming out soon. So I've been reading it and It is in that like post human state where a robot can take over and do everything. And yet, in the book, he is telling stories. He is learning to tell stories as one of the main drivers.

So, anyway, might be interesting. In your spare time. 

Richard: That was terrific. No, but that's it, isn't it? I mean, it's not, you know, There will be no diminishment in our capacity to take joy in the world and rearrange it and, you know, retell it and creatively engage it and attach ourselves to it. Nothing that we've, we've created or will create will ever diminish our ability to do that.

What we have to give up is the sense that only we can do it. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Well, thank you. This book was so thought provoking, as was this conversation, and I got so much out of it, and I feel like it's one of those books where my mind will continue to process all of the subthemes. Like, it's still going on.

There are so many layers to it. So, just sort of like the layers of the, of the deep. So, thank you so much for creating this, this um, very captivating and, and heartfelt book. 

Richard: Oh, thank you. It was a great pleasure talking with you. Good luck with everything. 

Zibby: Thank you. You too. 

Richard: Yep. 

Zibby: All right. Take care. Bye bye.