Pulitzer Prize winner!! Richard Powers, PLAYGROUND
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[0:43]Richard Powers is the author of Playground, a novel.
[0:46]He's also the author of 14 novels, including The Overstory, Be Will German, and Orpheum.
[0:52]He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award.
[0:57]He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
[1:00]Welcome, Richard. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Playground.
[1:04]Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for bringing me on.
[1:08]It is not about going on a Playground like kids and having fun.
[1:13]This is not like a mother's guide to, you know, raising your kids or anything like that.
[1:17]But it does have the very, very fun name that evokes that sense of joy.
[1:22]Well, you know, it's funny because it was a strange joy to write the book.
[1:30]I've been writing for 40 years. I think it's my 14th novel.
[1:35]And I don't think I've ever had as much of a pure gift or as much pleasure in telling a story.
[1:42]The way that things came together just seemed to drop out of the sky on me.
[1:47]So I'm very grateful for that.
[1:49]Oh, wow. Which part dropped first?
[1:53]I guess the story of the boy's friendship.
[1:56]So with the heart of this book, there's a slowly unfolding and long duration friendship between two Chicago winds.
[2:05]North side white kid named Todd Keen and a south side black named Ruffy Young.
[2:12]And they go to an elite high school together and they form a kind of odd couple friendship over competition.
[2:22]Really, they both pride themselves on being special kinds of intellects.
[2:27]And they are attracted to each other in a high school where not everybody understands them.
[2:33]But because they bond over intellect, they also bond over competitive games of intellect.
[2:40]And so the friendship is this decades long push poll where the two of them are always trying to outdo one another.
[2:48]So both boys have very difficult family lives in different ways marked with loss and difficult parents and just a lot of strife and trauma both in different ways.
[3:01]Yeah, another thing they bond over.
[3:03]Yes.
[3:04]And I feel like they both bond over education and reading and story as a way to escape and heal in a way.
[3:14]They, you know, Ruffy in particular is just cannot believe that he has access in the library to all these stories.
[3:21]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.
[3:32]And then of course Todd dives in. He's more interested in some of 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 the book.
[3:49]So thank you for that.
[3:52]You know, Chris, whoever it has this great line, he says, I write novels to learn things.
[4:00]I think that's always been true for me too.
[4:03]And the novels that I that I take the greatest pleasure out of as a reader also open up new worlds to be in terms of, you know, the, the, the, the milieu, the context, the things that the characters know about the world.
[4:17]It's always one of the great pleasures for me to become smarter, you know, vicariously down a road not taken in your own life.
[4:25]You teach us in the book about so many things, one of which is the effect on an island and island life and island economy and, and all of that when sort of interlopers appear and need it for its own demands.
[4:38]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.
[4:49]So can you speak a little bit to that particular plot line which is sort of at the heart of where this novel takes us.
[4:57]As you say, there really are three major plots we've talked about the, the Rafi Todd friendship that that's at the emotional heart of the book.
[5:06]The drama of the book concerns a small island in French Polynesia about half the size of Manhattan that had been the object of colonial exploitation in the early 20th century.
[5:20]The 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.
[5:30]They immediately began consuming these islands almost wholesale and 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.
[5:44]The tail in French Polynesia is one of these phosphate islands they've they've had a horrible traumatic episode with being eaten alive by the phosphate extraction industry, but they are now presented with another opportunity.
[6:00]Silicon Valley consortium.
[6:03]As as single them out as a possible launching spot for a project and sea studying, which is the creation of these floating autonomous cities that will somehow go out into international waters and be outside the jurisdiction of any nation state outside of all regulations and engage in new forms of government new forms of production.
[6:28]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.
[6:48]Or is it just another wave of colonialism and so much of the book is an exploration of the way that these islanders react to this offer and the ultimate referendum that they take on on their future.
[7:03]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 to but of course it's not.
[7:23]She's not for him and what happens when 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.
[7:36]I don't know you throws everything up in the air where did that piece of this come from for you.
[7:42]Well, a lot of the friendship comes out of personal experience and myself in the Chicago and I was raised on the north side before I moved to Bangkok Thailand at the age of 11 so.
[7:54]I in a way this book that kind of multiple plots of this book our psycho analysis attempts to kind of go back and re explore all the internal dynamics of my own mind.
[8:07]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 down state Illinois.
[8:21]And they meet a Pacific Islander, you know, in a Arawita who is making her first soldier and on a continent ever and Rafi falls in love with her so does Todd in a different way and of course the this friendship that's been dominated by competition for all these years finds a new object to play their game over.
[8:45]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 in literary fiction.
[8:54]I think what I want it to do in this story not only to destabilize the friendship but to make it clear to each of these men.
[9:06]They have depended on each other how much weariness there is in the friendship how very different their worldviews are as you said Rafi has sought solace and understanding through literature.
[9:20]Todd has gone in the opposite direction he's become a programmer he's looking to reassert control or his own life through code.
[9:29]This great digital revolution which is underway over the course of their lifetimes in a is an artist and she makes large scale constructions and neither of these boys knows quite what to do with her.
[9:46]It becomes a kind of you know a way of self understanding for them or at least that you know she brings into their lives the realization that they don't understand their own desires as well as.
[10:00]They ought to.
[10:01]So interesting.
[10:03]And you spoke about the competition
[10:05]between the boys.
[10:06]Chess plays a big role.
[10:08]And I just love how they pass each other in the hallway
[10:12]at school and throw out a chess move,
[10:14]like L5 to whatever.
[10:15]I don't really play chess.
[10:16]But throwing out the moves that they can almost
[10:19]continue this game, even when they're not playing it,
[10:23]which I just loved.
[10:26]Between them, there's always the game and the meta game.
[10:29]They're playing a game with chess,
[10:30]but they're also testing each other's capacities.
[10:34]They're testing their ability to one up the other.
[10:38]And of course, this spills all, you know,
[10:40]this has ramifications for decades to come,
[10:44]because ultimately, Todd embarks on a programming project
[10:51]in the early days of the web, that ends up exploding
[10:55]and turning him into a multi-millionaire.
[10:58]But it's Rafi that has given him the idea,
[11:00]the necessary, the crucial component
[11:03]for what he needs to make this thing click.
[11:05]And the way in which that is given,
[11:10]and then the way in which it is later contested
[11:13]is at the heart of the final reckoning
[11:17]of the friendship between these two boys.
[11:19]So as you say, there's the chess game,
[11:22]and then there's the game in the hallways
[11:23]of who can hold the game in their mind long enough
[11:26]to best the other one.
[11:27]But that again, ripples upwards and outwards
[11:29]throughout the entire friendship
[11:31]and ends up having very large consequences
[11:34]for both of them in their lives.
[11:36]I feel like one of the main themes of the book
[11:39]in a way is heartbreak.
[11:40]And I feel like that moment, the contesting of the idea
[11:45]and all of that and not to give things away.
[11:48]But I feel like that is just another example of heartbreak
[11:51]that comes out of it, the heartbreak of the destruction
[11:55]of this island and the friendship and the parents
[11:59]and the loved ones.
[12:01]Like there's a lot of heartbreak and destruction
[12:05]that we have to rebound from in this story in a way.
[12:08]It's quite sad in one lens,
[12:11]even though there is so much success in another.
[12:15]No, I like that a lot.
[12:16]You know, when I hadn't really invoked that word
[12:19]in my own mind to describe the dream, that kind of story,
[12:24]I've thought of it as a love story in a way.
[12:27]Can you continue to love somebody who has cut you off?
[12:32]Can you acknowledge the love for a friend in your own heart
[12:37]where that love has never been able to be acknowledged
[12:39]in the real world of the friendship itself?
[12:42]There's the love of these 80 people on their island
[12:46]or the island and for their way of life
[12:49]and how do you hold on to the love
[12:53]of a custom and love of a legacy
[12:56]and yet bring it forward into the world in a viable way?
[13:00]And, you know, there's a third frame of the book
[13:03]which has to do with an elderly diver from a friend in Canada.
[13:09]So a Francophone girl in Montreal
[13:13]who is one of the very first ever to use the aqua long
[13:17]because her father is involved in the creation of this device
[13:21]and she falls in love with the ocean
[13:25]and while she gets married and has a family and has children,
[13:28]she is constantly in the position of them to choose
[13:32]between her commitment to her domestic situation
[13:36]and this love for, you know, three quarters of the planet
[13:41]that would seem very abstract to a lot of people
[13:45]but to her is the heart and soul of who she is
[13:47]and what she wants from this life.
[13:50]Now, you know, calling it a novel about love
[13:52]and calling a novel about heartbreak might not be all
[13:55]that different, you know, they are very grossly wound up
[13:59]as literature has always shown us
[14:01]and to explore the ways in which love asks things from us
[14:07]that we can't satisfy or that forever just be beyond
[14:12]our ability to consummate or to know or to be a piece with.
[14:16]Maybe that's it, maybe it's that moving target
[14:19]between love and heartbreak that we all have to operate
[14:23]in that the book explores.
[14:24]It's so true, interesting.
[14:26]There's also, I mean, there's also sacrifice
[14:29]and other sort of note on the love,
[14:31]on the love you did, I don't know,
[14:34]a timeline if you will or whatever.
[14:36]I mean, you might say that the love between the boys
[14:39]has been compromised at times or is clouded by competition
[14:43]and yet Rafi does the most selfless thing ever
[14:47]when Todd is really in need
[14:49]and that that moment was like incredibly telling.
[14:52]I mean, you can't, it's one thing to have some mercenary demands
[14:56]later in life, but true love shows itself
[15:00]and big acts like that.
[15:02]Well, I do think that for me as a reader,
[15:06]this is something that I've discovered as a writer
[15:09]over a long period of time, I'm kind of a slow study
[15:11]in some ways, but it's what we give up.
[15:15]That's a measure of what actually is most significant
[15:21]and meaningful to us.
[15:22]And I think in terms, when people say I cried over a book
[15:25]or I'll never forget this book or I was so deeply moved
[15:29]by the book, what moves us?
[15:31]I think is people for a moment finding the capacity
[15:36]to be better than they ought to be able to be?
[15:40]That moment of sacrifice, that moment of acceptance
[15:44]of loss, but also that sort of moment
[15:47]where you just say all the same, nevertheless,
[15:51]I need to do this or this is an essential part of who I am.
[15:55]I think it's that transitory selflessness
[16:02]in people who like all of us all the time
[16:06]need to further our own wellbeing
[16:08]that always makes me catch my breath as a reader.
[16:11]It's a tough book to talk about
[16:13]because there's a big reveal at the end.
[16:15]There's so much that I wouldn't want to spoil,
[16:21]but it does open up and there's this way
[16:24]in which I think you're right.
[16:26]You think you're reading one kind of story
[16:30]and then the scales kind of drop from your eyes
[16:33]and you realize, no, there's another sacrifice going on here.
[16:38]There's another self, the story is actually
[16:42]very different than the stakes of the story
[16:44]are very different than what I thought they were
[16:46]when I was reading it.
[16:48]Absolutely.
[16:49]Not to mention that the whole thing is told by someone,
[16:53]I mean, maybe this is too much to give away,
[16:55]but well, okay.
[16:57]Well, the narrator, the state of the world for the narrator
[17:01]himself is another sort of plot line
[17:03]where you're racing against time in a way,
[17:05]which of course we all are.
[17:07]Yeah, so we know, I don't think,
[17:11]I don't think you've given anything away.
[17:12]I think it's not spoiling anything to say
[17:15]that much of the book is narrated by Todd as an older man.
[17:19]And he's telling about the losses that he's incurred
[17:24]in over the course of this friendship
[17:27]and over the course of his professional success.
[17:29]But we also learned very early on
[17:32]that he has just received a diagnosis
[17:35]of Louis body dementia.
[17:37]So he becomes almost a doubly unreliable narrator.
[17:41]I mean, unreliable in the literal sense
[17:45]of losing his own memory and losing his ability
[17:49]to articulate and say who he is and hold on
[17:52]to his identity in himself.
[17:55]But he's also a classic unreliable narrator.
[17:58]Let me tell you about my friend Rafi
[17:59]and what went wrong between us.
[18:02]And we're only ever getting Todd's part of the story.
[18:04]So it kind of have to infer what was going on
[18:07]in Rafi's mind all that time.
[18:10]So where did some of this come from for you?
[18:14]I know it's somewhat the location specific and all of that.
[18:18]But some of this loss and heartbreak,
[18:21]it has to come from somewhere.
[18:24]There's a lot of loss in the book.
[18:26]There's a lot of, there's darkness
[18:28]and getting through the, bringing your head up above water
[18:33]again, we have to climb through that.
[18:35]So just wondering, you know, to the extent you want to discuss
[18:39]where this, you know, what memory is this draws on for you
[18:42]even memory is perhaps you want to forget,
[18:44]which is why Todd is forgetting them.
[18:47]Yeah, well, such a raw and necessary question.
[18:50]There was both a personal loss and the collective loss.
[18:55]I think that was hard at the heart of creating the book.
[18:59]The personal loss was the death of my older sister
[19:03]about two and a half years ago.
[19:06]And I dedicate the book to her.
[19:08]I dedicate the book to two people, actually my sister
[19:10]and my, my dear lifelong friend of many decades
[19:14]whose story formed the basis of a lot of Rafi's story.
[19:19]But my sister Peg had given me a book on coral reefs
[19:24]when I was 10 years old.
[19:26]and we were living on the north side of Chicago.
[19:28]And, you know, I was kind of a precocious reader, I guess.
[19:32]And, you know, I devoured this book
[19:34]and it's amazing pictures of these creatures
[19:37]from outer space, you know,
[19:39]with a psychedelic colors and forms that you just couldn't
[19:42]imagine were alive.
[19:46]And, you know, I would look out my window onto the,
[19:52]you know, endless suburban streets of North Chicago
[19:55]and look down at this book and, and just have this sense
[19:59]of, you know, out.
[20:00]There are two earths here, and I can't put them together, you know, I just can't figure out how they can coexist.
[20:07]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,
[20:26]I was snorkeling in these same reefs that I had been reading about in an entirely abstract science fiction way the year before.
[20:35]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.
[20:46]And I think there's something different about the death of a sibling, you know, I've survived both my parents, many, many older friends, but I think when a sister dies or a brother dies, your own mortality is so tied up in your realization of your loss of this person who you can't be closer to.
[21:14]There's just 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, so
[21:31]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.
[21:49]You know, that's what made me go back and remember this book that I had read in college, classic book by Johann Heisenberg called Homo Ludens, who was published in 1938, he was famous, a famous, Dutch art historian.
[22:00]And he said, look, play culture grows out of play, play is older than culture.
[22:06]It's older than the human species.
[22:08]And sure enough, you know, the more thought about it, the more ubiquitous this impulse is as a way of learning about the world.
[22:17]You know, evolution uses the play instinct to prepare animals to exist in the world.
[22:24]And, you know, that loss of the most playful person in my life began to trigger me 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.
[22:41]And I wanted to tell a story that addressed that, you know, that our sense of diminishment in this world as so much of the diversity and vitality of the world that we inherited is disappearing in the wake of our expansion.
[23:02]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?
[23:15]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 the play is, can we use it?
[23:27]Can we tell a story that will reduce our anxiety and our fears efficiently for us to go on living productively in this world? And that's what I tried to do in this now.
[23:40]I'm so sorry about your sister. I'm so sad. I'm sorry. She sounds amazing.
[23:46]Well, in analyzing play and all the things and 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 just take over who we are.
[24:09]You know, I think of this and 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?
[24:21]And I feel like, 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.
[24:33]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.
[24:50]Rafi saying, you know, they're never going to get my territory, right, they're never going to write poems, they're never going to understand books.
[24:58]And, you know, in a heartbreaking way, I follow that story from its, you know, from its earliest forms when they're debating this in high school to the latest forms as Todd is in his final days and able to claim one kind of victory.
[25:19]But also knowing in his heart that it's a loss and 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?
[25:35]And then now what do we do? How do we find personal meaning? How do we find creativity and, you know, how do we propel ourselves in a productive and gratifying way in the world?
[25:45]We're making things that can do everything that we can do better than we do it.
[25:50]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 larger question that I've been writing about for at least the last couple of books in overstory and bewilderment.
[26:06]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.
[26:22]We thought the story of life on earth is basically us and everything else is just here for our use.
[26:32]And, you know, we are really a heart 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.
[26:43]And in these last three books, I think of a moment, as a, as a, as a trilogy of sorts.
[26:49]But I'm saying there's, 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 are 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.
[27:12]And while we are terrified of the living world and have had somehow to have developed this culture that wants to dominate it and take absolute control over it.
[27:23]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.
[27:31]Ultimately, what we have to do is find stories, find ways of, of making films, writing novels that reverse our sense of centrality.
[27:44]We have joined ourselves to a much, much larger way of thinking about what life is and what life is doing.
[27:52]And it's funny, I'm reading the wild robot, the wild robot escapes by Peter Brown, have you read this?
[27:58]So my son is nine and he's like, Mom, you have to read this. It's so good because the movie is coming out soon. So I've been reading it.
[28:05]And it is in that like post human, a must state where a robot can take over and do everything.
[28:11]And yet in the book, he is telling stories.
[28:14]He is learning to tell stories is one of the main drivers. So anyway, might be interesting.
[28:20]It doesn't 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 detach ourselves to it.
[28:37]Nothing that we've created or will create will ever diminish our ability to do that.
[28:43]What we have to give up is the sense that only we can do it.
[28:49]Oh my gosh. Well, thank you. This book was so thought-provoking as was this conversation.
[28:54]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 the sub themes.
[29:03]Like it's still going on. There are so many layers to it. So just sort of like the layers of the deep.
[29:09]So thank you so much for creating this very captivating and heartfelt story.
[29:16]Well, thank you. It was great pleasure talking with you. Good luck with everything.
[29:19]Thank you. You too.
[29:21]Yep. All right. Take care. Bye-bye.
[29:23]Thanks for listening. Two moms don't have time to read books. If you love it, please leave a review.
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