Monsterpieces: Richard Powers

[It’s been a couple of months since my last post, and I don’t want you to think I’ve been devoured by a monster, so I’m offering my reviews of two Richard Powers novels in case you’re short of long novels to read while you await the publication of William Vollmann’s 3400-page A Table for Fortune. A single monster inhabits both Powers novels: humanity. More specifically, human-contrived systems pursuing a long war against nature, against even some of the largest natural systems—oceans and forests. Though long, layered, and complex, his novels are not monstrosities but ingenious compendia of that ancient form that preceded much of the monster’s development: stories. What the novels have in common with the monsterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that Powers much admires, is the inclusion of sciences--those that help current humans see what their ancestors and contemporaries have done and are doing to the world. The closest Powers comes to a formal monsterpiece is probably the 1991 novel The Gold Bug Variations that is about and imitates genetic structure. The two long novels reviewed below are more accessible, perhaps because the resistance to the monster needs reader recruits.]

Playground

Norton, 2024

[Open Letters Review]

I’ve read all of Richard Powers’ fourteen novels and have reviewed many of them since his second, Prisoner’s Dilemma in 1988. I mention these facts to support my contention that Powers is now—with Morrison gone, Pynchon gone soft, and DeLillo silent—the greatest practicing American novelist. If his new novel, Playground, is not one of his very best, it’s a pleasurable and prescient assemblage of his Greatest Hits—scientific themes, prodigy characters, global dangers, linguistic ingenuity, literary gamesmanship.

Playing literary games is not usually the first-mentioned characteristic of Powers’ fiction, but Prisoner’s Dilemma was rooted in 1950s game theory. One of the significant characters in Powers’ Pulitzer-winning The Overstory (which is one of his very best) is a computer game inventor. One of the four major characters in Playground, Todd Keane, is the billionaire creator of the Internet site that gives the novel its title. Only at the end of The Gold Bug Variations (another of Powers’ very best) do we discover who have been narrating the whole story. At the end of Playground, we find that all three seemingly separate strands of narration have been created by Keane’s DeepDive AI that uses his private anecdotes and public information to construct what he—or it--calls a “rich, robust, and convincing story” but one with a counter-factual happy ending. You may feel I’m inflicting a spoiler with this information, but I think of it as a helper because many of the early readers of Playground were confused, even at the end, by the novel’s narrative game.

Keane and his long-time, then estranged friend, Rafi Young played chess against each other as kids, then move up to the more complex Go as college students in the late 1980s at the University of Illinois where Keane studies programming and Young tries to be a poet. He says AI will never be able to write poems, but Powers suggests that AI may be able to write a novel. Or maybe Powers--in this novel where all living beings including fish play—is playing with or against his readers. Yes, Playground claims to have been composed by Artificial Intelligence, but we know—don’t we?--that it was written by the natural—but almost preternatural—intelligence of Richard Powers.

Powers’ knowledge of various sciences is usually the first-remarked quality of his fiction. The Gold Bug Variations had as its subject and its form recombinant DNA. The Overstory was about the complex collaborative systems of forests. The science in Playground is oceanography, and as in The Overstory Powers introduces a female character—a generation older than Keane, Young, and the Tahitian woman, Ina Aroita, whom both men love—to provide oceanographic information and dive experience. Powers puts into Evelyne Beaulieu’s mouth the wonders of the deep—and the threat of polluted oceans to life on dry land. Powers lives on a Tennessee mountain, but the detailed enthusiasms he gives to Beaulieu are a remarkable combination of research and invention. In this novel’s vision, land is like chess and the oceans are like a gigantic Go board of play beyond current human understanding, even that of AI.

Despite its high-flying games and deep-diving science, Playground is grounded in two somewhat traditional plots. At the university, the sculptor Ina falls in love with and lives with Rafi, which leads the two childhood friends to be estranged. Decades later, Ina and Rafi have adopted two children and are living on Makatea, a Polynesian island with 78 other inhabitants. Once ravished by phosphate mining, Makatea is now threatened by a certain tech billionaire’s desire to use the island as a jumping off point for the construction of floating cities. This late connection between the three former friends may have seemed “convincing” to Keane’s AI, but readers could find Powers’ resolution of the marriage plot and the environmental plot not as plausible as the AI might think. This would be unfortunate because the village life of the island is presented with authoritative anthropological expertise—and humor, not a hallmark of Powers’ fiction.

Powers knows Rafi’s literary language, employs Todd’s computing jargon, and describes the silent language of Ina’s sculptures. Then there are mixed dialects of the inhabitants of Makatea. In The Overstory, trees have a language, a way of communicating to each other. The same is true of many of the fish described in Playground. Influenced by Huizinga’s Homo Ludenz, a classic study of play in human culture, Powers suggests that everywhere life is playing what Wittgenstein called “language games.” Powers would have humans see and feel this connection with non-human communication systems, possibly a basis for humans’ new respect for and protection of the natural world. In The Overstory, Powers referred to James Lovelock’s Gaia that posited Earth as living. In Playground, the planet is speaking.

I have in another review of Powers called him a soteriological writer, one who would have his fiction save lives. Keane is dying, the heroic scientist of The Gold Bug Variations is dying, the protagonist of Gain, yet another of Powers greatest novels, is dying. Fiction can’t save them, but their deaths point to systemic causes. Forests and seas are dying. I think Powers believes that the right kind of stories—global in scale, personal in empathy--can retard the deaths of nature. Powers is no cheap catastrophist; the sciences he knows tell him how contingent humans have made all life. Perhaps he plays narrative and formal games to balance his earnest pessimism, or plays to draw readers into his diagnoses of contemporary ills. The conflict between Powers’ seriousness and his play is present throughout Playground in Rafi’s desire for moral justice and Todd’s passion for free invention. I won’t reveal how the conflict is resolved by the AI or the novelist.

Readers less familiar than I am with Powers’ novels may well be as ravished by the reach and astonishments of oceanic Playground as were many readers of the tree-loving The Overstory. But I found Playground more a combinatorial game—Greatest Hits--than a site of new, free, imaginative play. Is it fair to expect America’s greatest living novelist to, at the age of 67, create a fiction one would not recognize as a Powers production? Perhaps not. Playground is an impressive and warm-hearted book. Maybe only I want more or different play from Richard Powers.

The Overstory

Norton, 2018

[Full Stop]

The “overstory” of Richard Powers’s title is a term for the canopy of a forest, the foliage at the top of the trees. Powers has sometimes been criticized for being a “top-down” novelist, one who presents characters from the high or long perspective of history, science, or music. These critics carp that his often highly intelligent characters are not human, don’t live and breathe and feel for each other. In The Overstory, Powers twits those critics by presenting — with his usual scientific brio — trees that live, breathe, and signal to each other, exist in a “social” relation with other trees and the biosphere that depends on them. Trees were exhibiting qualities of animal life long before the human story began and will be here long after the human story is over, the latter hastened by our suicidal deforesting of the planet. Powers knows, and a psychologist in the book says, that humans need “good stories” to be persuaded by scientists’ alarms, so Powers creates a band of varied and lively characters with back stories and understories to make his novel a “bottom-up,” as well as a top-down, fiction, one that equals his best work.

Partial disclosure: you will find, perhaps on the back cover of The Overstory, a quote by me (from my review of his last novel, Orfeo) asserting that Powers is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Further disclosure: I have conversed with Powers several times when he visited the university where I used to teach, and I have occasionally corresponded with him about his books. More disclosure: I have read all eleven of his previous novels, but I review only those that I think are his most interesting and instructive. Penultimate disclosure: since reading in 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow, the deepest drilling environmental fiction of the last 50 years, I value most those novels that tell overstories, what I call “systems novels,” books such as Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, Gain, and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award in 2006. If you share my values, I think you will find The Overstory a profound and important book, one that does for the life that hovers over us what Pynchon did for the fossils beneath us. Even if you don’t now share my aesthetic priorities, you may after reading The Overstory.

As usual, Powers chooses limited omniscience, expanded at times into full omniscience about the futures of his characters. On several occasions in The Overstory, Powers — not one of his characters — directly remarks about art. In the following passage, he seems to address those critics I mentioned by defending the kind of fiction in which the passage is found:

Every one [of the novels his character is hearing read to him] imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive — character — is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court . . . life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Mobilizing fiction on a “larger scale” requires one of Powers’s favorite words, in this novel as well as in the rest of his work: ingenuity. A former computer programmer and musician and student of genetics, Powers knows the importance of form in the communication of information. Probably his most formally ingenious novel is The Gold Bug Variations, with its double structure from four-part genetics and Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

In the first short section of The Overstory, a character looks up into a tree described as “fractal.” As James Gleick pointed out decades ago in Chaos, tree branches create a non-linear pattern of fractal self-similarity, both to the tree as a whole and to other branches. The Overstory has a fractal design. The names of the novel’s four parts — “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds” — indicate the book’s basic structure and growth. Powers’ fractal ingenuity manifests itself in the similarities, bifurcations, branchings, connections, and further branchings among the nine major characters introduced in the independent, named sections of the 152-page “Roots.”

Though the settings from which the characters come are specific and identifiable, Powers supplies few temporal markers, perhaps appropriate for “understories,” a word he uses throughout. Most characters seem to have been born in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The exception is Patricia Westerford, a botanist, author of The Secret Forest, opponent of clear cutting, and Powers’s spokesperson, who is about twenty years older than the others. She has the initials of Peter Wohlleben, who published a popular book entitled The Hidden Life of Trees. If you would like to dig into other roots of The Overstory, there are Donald Peattie’s Natural History of North American Trees, to which Powers refers in the novel; James Lovelock’s Gaia, which furnishes an epigraph; and Thoreau, who supplies several quotes. For those interested in the history of American deforestation, see Annie Proulx’s 2016 novel Barkskins. And for a powerful visual of clear cutting, there is the paperback cover of Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel, like The Overstory, that refers to fractal patterns and is partially set in redwood country.

Some trees grow very slowly. Readers will need to be patient as Powers introduces his people who are similar in their experience of trauma and in their association with trees. Nicholas Hoel grew up on an Iowa farm with one of a few surviving chestnut trees; as an adult he finds his whole family asphyxiated by a faulty gas heater. Mimi Ma’s Chinese father planted a mulberry in the family’s yard in Illinois and years later killed himself underneath it. The novel’s psychologist, Adam Appich, identifies with a maple after his sister disappears on a Florida vacation. Vietnam vet Douglas Pavlicek is saved by a banyan after parachuting into the jungle. Neelay Mehta, son of Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley, falls out of an oak, cripples himself, and becomes a whiz inventor of computer games. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, a married couple, come to appreciate their backyard trees after Ray suffers a debilitating stroke. College student Olivia Vandergriff begins to care for trees only after she almost dies from an accidental electrocution.

Given the commonalities in “Roots,” readers may feel Powers is more an overlord manipulating his characters than a teller of understories. But in “Trunk” we soon see how the characters’ similar backgrounds bring them together. Olivia and Nicholas meet cute over “Free Tree Art,” move together to the West Coast in search of some post-traumatic purpose, join a nature “Defense Force” (that resembles Earth First!), and spend a year sitting on a platform in a giant redwood. Mimi and Douglas meet after a small park in their city is destroyed and join the same defense group in Oregon, where Adam Appich shows up to interview activists for his Ph.D. dissertation on group psychology. After the leader of the group is killed, Douglas is abused by the police in a demonstration, and Mimi is wounded in another demonstration, the two couples and Adam form a Monkey Wrench gang of arsonists. When the action they say will be their last — burning a resort in progress in Idaho — goes awry, one of the gang dies at the scene and the survivors disperse, ending “Trunk.”

Powers is insightful about the motives of his eco-terrorists, their appreciation of natural life after personal traumas, their hatred of industry and police, their idealistic desire to save other humans from their suicidal destruction of forests. Powers spends many pages describing the lives of Olivia and Nicholas 200 feet over the ground in their redwood. Powers’s presentation of this literal overstory — the weather that moves through it, the life forms that exist in it, the close seeing and clear thinking that can occur when one is unplugged in it — is the scientific and emotional center of his book and a mini Walden, for Powers’s language, like Thoreau’s, is equal to what Thoreau called the “extravagant” nature he witnessed by separating himself from humans. Olivia and Nicholas and readers learn to love the tree and its connections to the forest around; when the tree is cut down, the characters’ love turns to rage against the machine of development.

These five activists never meet Patricia Westerford, but several do read her Secret Forest from which Powers periodically inserts the science that underlies The Overstory. As a graduate student, Westerford discovered that trees in forests communicate in subtle ways with each other, warning of dangers, activating defenses, even attacking threats. But she was mocked by other botanists who defended clear cutting and organized replanting of trees — which destroyed the complex ecology of true forests, turning them into monoculture tree farms. When others’ research proves Westerford right, she becomes a well-known authority. Her lecture to environmentalists near the end of the novel is a remarkable tour de force. Like the intricate genetics in The Gold Bug Variations, Westerford’s descriptions of exceedingly complex feedback loops and strange, mysterious tree forms are necessary to substantiate Powers’s stories. The difference is that Westerford’s trees can be seen: just do a Google images search and view the trees for yourself. One of Powers’s familiar prodigies of learning, Westerford is also the conduit though which the author pipes in world-wide myths about forests and trees, such as Yggdrasil and other Trees of Life.

The other important character who does not meet the activists is Neelay Mehta, the game programmer. If Westerford is Powers’s earth-hugging authority on the past lives of trees, Neelay is the high-flying collector of future arboreal information whose last name suggests a “meta” dimension. He turns from producing successful competitive computer games to creating virtual experiences dense with nature, employing hundreds of programmers to make his simulations as robust and rich as possible. At the end of Powers’ novel Gain, a woman dies of cancer probably produced by environmental toxins, but Powers offers a shard of hope by making one of her children a cancer researcher. At the end of The Overstory, Powers moves beyond Neelay’s initial earth-from-above simulations to posit what Powers calls “the learners,” who are like angels of Big Data moving through the air over us, their algorithms assembling and organizing such comprehensive and persuasive information about trees and the rest of nature that humans of the future will no longer need stories to save themselves from suicide.

One present function of the “learners” (which Powers doesn’t mention) is identifying from satellites illegal logging operations and sales.

“Crown” and “Seeds” quick cut among the characters’ lives twenty years and more after the arson in 1979. The activists have gone underground, changed names and occupations. Betrayal, guilt, imprisonment, hopelessness, and a possible pedagogical suicide make for a pessimistic crown. Nicholas creates art out of fallen branches that only the “learners” will see. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Czaly let their backyard revert to woods, but this non-cultivation of their garden, like Nicholas’s art, is an isolated seed. Presumably writing most of this novel before the election of Donald Trump — and the appointment of Zinke at Interior, Pruitt at the E.P.A., and Perry at Energy — Powers seems to have foreseen the current accelerated assault on nature: “Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.” Westerford has written The New Metamorphosis and created a seed bank of endangered species, but only the “learners” offer hope for a transformed future in the real world.

Powers has plucked from present streams of data sufficient information to demonstrate the complex lives of trees and the necessity of preserving those lives. He has worked his learning into and through many affecting stories in The Overstory, but he chose to invent environmental activists who failed, who killed one of their own almost forty years ago. If the “learners” don’t deliver their saving overstory soon, we are going to need “imaginers” more radical — a word with its origin in “roots” — than the characters in The Overstory.

Despite the disappointing election results for Jill Stein and the Green Party in 2016, eco-activism — or even eco-terrorism — may not be as futile as the recent history in Powers’s novel seems to imply. Westerford shows that forests migrate as a response to threatening conditions. Ray Brinkman gets interested in trees by playing one that moves in Macbeth. Imagine a hundred thousand humans dressed as trees and migrated to Washington. This would be an event the “learners” and maybe politicians would register. How about a “War on Christmas (Trees)”? Fleet-footed activists come out at night and spray the trees for sale on city streets with orange paint, recalling Agent Orange and disrupting wasteful tree farms. The Kochs’ estates have trees. Could they be girdled by laser-equipped drones? Eco-suicide is also mass murder. Ray Brinkman — a man on the brink — is a lawyer who argues that if the planet is our home, humans have the right to defend it. Florida has a “hold your ground” law. Imagine protesters breaching the fences at Mar-a-Lago and taking back our home. Twenty years ago, I published a novel (Passing Off) in which an eco-terrorist intends to bring down the Parthenon, which she considers a symbol of building mania in a city surrounded by deforested mountains. A scholar has recently claimed that a scene on the Parthenon frieze approvingly depicts human sacrifice. I have begun to wonder if only the sacrifice of human lives can slow down, if not prevent, environmental catastrophe in the future.

Final disclosure: like Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop, I have a family history of cutting forests. My grandfather ran a sawmill in the Green Mountain state. An uncle cut trees. As a teenager, I peeled pulp and stacked lumber. But I don’t think my guilt affects my judgment of the importance of The Overstory. Read the e-book version of this 500-page novel, save a tree, spread Powers’s words, become a seed of information, contribute to the “learners’” global truth, and think about performing some arboreal action for the sake of your grandchildren.