Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, this powerful novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Powers (The Overstory, Bewilderment) follows Rafi and Todd, polar opposites who bond over a board game at an elite school. Their lives diverge—Rafi pursues literature, while Todd’s AI breakthrough reshapes humanity's future. Meanwhile, Evie and Ina's paths converge on the island of Makatea, where a plan to create floating cities sparks deep questions about technology, the environment, and human destiny. Set in the vast Pacific, Playground explores the final frontier of colonization and our evolving relationship with nature.
Before the earth,
before the moon,
before the stars,
before the sun,
before the sky,
even before the sea,
there was only time and Ta’aroa.
Ta’aroa made Ta’aroa. Then he made an egg that could house him.
He set the egg spinning in the void. Inside the spinning egg, suspended in that endless vacuum, Ta’aroa huddled, waiting.
With all that endless time and all that eternal waiting, Ta’aroa grew weary inside his egg. So he shook his body and cracked the shell and slid out of his self-made prison.
Outside, everything was muted and still. And Ta’aroa saw that he was alone.
Ta’aroa was an artist, so he played with what he had. His first medium was eggshell. He crunched the shell into countless pieces and let them fall. The pieces of eggshell drifted down to make the foundations of the Earth.
His second medium was tears. He cried in his boredom and his loneliness, and his tears filled up the Earth’s oceans and its lakes and all the world’s rivers.
His third medium was bone. He used his spine to make islands. Mountain chains appeared wherever his vertebrae rose above his pooled tears.
Creation became a game. From his fingernails and toenails, he made the scales of fish and the shells of turtles. He plucked out his own feathers and turned them into trees and bushes, which he filled with birds. With his own blood, he spread a rainbow across the sky.
Ta’aroa summoned all the other artists. The artists came forward with their baskets full of materials— sand and pebbles, corals and shells, grass and palm fronds and threads spun from the fibers of many plants. And together with Ta’aroa, the artists shaped and sculpted Tāne, the god of forests and peace and beauty and all crafted things.
Then the artists brought the other gods into being— scores of them. Kind ones and cruel ones, lovers and engineers and tricksters. And these gods filled in the rest of the unfolding world with color and line and creatures of all kinds—land, air, and sea.
Tāne decided to decorate the sky. He toyed with the possibilities, dotting the blackness with points of light that spun around the center of the night in great pinwheels. He made the sun and moon, which split time into day and night.
Now that there were days and months, now that the world was sparked with branching and unfolding life, now that the sky was itself a work of art, it was time for Ta’aroa to finish his game. He fashioned and split the world into seven layers, and in the bottom- most layer he put people— someone to play with at last.
He watched the people puzzle things out, and it delighted him. The people multiplied and filled the lowest layer like fish fill up a reef. The people found plants and trees and animals and shells and rocks, and with all their discoveries they made new things, just as Ta’aroa had made the world.
Growing in number, human beings felt hemmed in. So when they discovered the portal that led up to the level of the world above theirs— the doorway that Ta’aroa had hidden just for them— they pried it open, passed through, and started spreading out again, one layer higher.
And so people kept on filling and
climbing, filling and climbing.
But each new layer still
belonged to Ta’aroa,
who set all things
moving from
inside his
spinning
egg.
It took a disease eating my brain to help me remember.
The three of us were walking home from campus one night in December, almost forty years ago. The year that Ina first set foot on a continent. We had seen a student production of The Tempest and she’d sobbed through the whole last act. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
Rafi and I escorted her back to her boardinghouse, a dozen blocks from the Quad. Ina wasn’t used to square blocks. They disoriented her. She kept getting turned around. Everything distracted her and stopped her in her tracks. A crow. A gray squirrel. The December moon.
We tried to warm her, Rafi and I, one on each side, each almost twice her height. Her first- ever winter. The cold was homicidal. She kept saying, “How can people live in this? How do the animals survive? It’s insanity! Pure madness!”
Then she stopped in place on the sidewalk and yanked us both by the elbows. Her red face was round with awe. “Oh, God. Look at that. Look at that!” Neither of us could tell what in the world she was seeing.
Little pellets were dropping through the air and landing on the grass with a faint click. They stuck to the ends of the frozen blades like white, wet flowers. I hadn’t even noticed. Nor had Rafi. Chicago boys, raised on the lake effect.
Ina had never seen anything like it. She was watching bits of eggshell fall from the sky to make the Earth.
She stood there on the iron sidewalk, freezing to death, cursing us in joy. “Would you look at that? Look at that! You stupid shits! Why didn’t you tell me about snow?”
Ina Aroita went down to the beach on a Saturday morning to look for pretty materials. She took her seven-year-old Hariti with her. They left Afa and Rafi at the house, playing on the floor with toy transforming robots. The beach was only a short walk down from their bungalow near the hamlet of Moumu, on the shallow rise between the cliffs and the sea on the eastern coast of the island of Makatea, in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia, as far from any continent as habitable land could get— a speck of green confetti, as the French called these atolls, lost on an endless field of blue.
Born in Honolulu to a Hawaiian petty officer fi rst class and a Tahitian flight attendant, raised on naval bases in Guam and Samoa, educated at a gigantic university in the American Midwest, Ina Aroita had worked for years as a maid for a luxury hotel chain in Papeete, Tahiti, before boating 150 miles over to Makatea to garden and fish and weave and knit a little and raise two children and try to remember why she was alive.
“The bird spread over the beach, almost as big as Hariti.”
Makatea was where Rafi Young caught up with her again at last. And on that island, the two of them married and raised a family as well as they could, away from the growing sadness of the real world.
Four years on Makatea convinced Ina Aroita that she was alive for the sole purpose of enjoying her moody husband and their two children, her crab boy Afa and her timid dancer Hariti. She grew things—yam, taro, breadfruit, chestnut, eggplant, avocado. She made things— shell sculptures and pandanus baskets and mandala-painted rocks. Sometimes one of the handful of tourists who sailed to Makatea to see the fabled ruins or climb the spectacular cliffs would buy a piece or two.
Ina Aroita built her beachcomber assemblages in her yard, turning the fringe of jungle behind her restored cottage into an open-air museum for no one. Tendrils of Homalium and Myrsine grew over her work and covered it in green, the way the jungle buried the island’s rusted engine parts and remnant railroad from the time of the phosphate mines.
On that Saturday, mother and daughter combed through the stretch between high and low tides, sifting for riches. The treasures were plentiful: clam and crab and snail shells, pretty bits of coral and obsidian polished by the merciless surf. They walked across the salt-sprayed rocks down to where the waves broke. Troves of incredible loot hid everywhere in plain sight.
Hariti found a flat blue stone that sparkled when she wetted it.
“Is it a jewel, Maman?”
“Oh, it’s a jewel, all right. Like you!”
The girl decided it was safe to laugh. She stuffed the stone into a mesh bag to bring back up to the house. Later, she and her mother would plan together what to make with all their smooth, speckled, shining things.
While they searched, Ina Aroita told her daughter all about Ta’aroa.
“Can you believe it? He built the world out of shells from his own egg!”
Ina had learned the tale from her own mother, at the soft-serve shack on Waikiki Beach two miles down from Diamond Head, when she was seven years old. And now she taught it to this new and strange seven-year-old artist who badly needed myths of bold enterprise. The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.
Ina was just getting to her favorite part, where Ta’aroa calls up all the artists to help him, when Hariti let loose a bloodcurdling cry. Ina scrambled over the rocks toward her daughter, searching everywhere for the threat. There was always a threat, with Hariti. Her birth parents had died just as she was reaching the age of memory, and she never forgot that the world was forever poised to take everything.
Whatever the threat this time, Ina couldn’t see it. Nothing on the length of that beach had the power to harm them. The coast was truly clear, all the way up the curving shore and around the headlands to the ghost settlement of Teopoto at the island’s northern tip. And still Ina’s excitable girl froze in place, wailing.
The terror lay two steps in front of Hariti’s small bare feet. In a shallow pit on the beach lay the corpse of a bird. Its limp wings draped, its legs sprawled, and the beaked head hung helpless to one side: an albatross, dead for a long time. It was not fully grown, for the wings of a full-grown albatross would have stretched twice the height of Ina Aroita. Still, the bird spread over the beach, almost as big as Hariti.
The soft parts had dissolved into a golden outline against the gray sand. The pinnate remains of the rotting wings looked like dried palm fronds. Two great sticks— the creature’s humeri— came out of the empty shoulder sockets. The silhouette still struggled to rise and fly away.
A chunk of sternum and the slim brown bands of friable rib enclosed what was left of the bird’s abdomen. Inside that chest, immune to decomposing, lay two fistfuls of plastic pieces. Hariti screamed again and kicked sand at the dead thing. She took a step toward the carcass in disgust, as if to tread on the remains and grind them into the beach. Her mother tugged her back, too hard. But the shock of being yanked back and held tight at last halted the girl’s howling.
“What happened to it? Why is that stuff inside?”
She asked in English, a new habit that Ina Aroita was trying to break.
“Il a mangé un truc qu’il n’aurait pas dû.” It ate something it shouldn’t have.
“Like junk food?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why did it eat junk food, Mom? It’s a bird. Birds eat good food.”
“It got confused.”
Ina’s every answer made the world more terrifying. The girl pressed her wet face into her mother’s bare thigh.
“It’s creepy, Maman. Make it go away.”
“It’s a creature, Hariti. We should give it a good burial.”
That idea took hold of the girl, who loved both rituals and digging in the sand. But as Hariti started to drop handfuls of ground-up coral and shells onto the cadaver, Ina Aroita stopped her again. Ina reached her hand into the chest of the decomposing bird and drew out two bottle caps, a squirt top, the bottom of a black film canister at least fifteen years old, a disposable cigarette lighter, a few meters of tangled-up monofilament line, and a button in the shape of a daisy.
She popped the colored hoard into their mesh bag, alongside the morning’s other treasures.
“Nous pouvons faire quelque chose avec ceux-ci.” We can make something with these.
But she had no idea what.
They shaped the grave into a mound, round and smooth. Hariti wanted to put a cross at the head, like the graves in the island’s two churchyards. So they made a cross out of hibiscus twigs and pushed it into the sand. Then they lined the mound with green snail shells and small yellow pebbles.
“Say a prayer, Maman.”
Ina paused over the choice of languages. This confused bird might have come all the way from Antarctica, via Australia or Chile. It had lived its life mostly on the water. Ina said a few words in Tahitian, because French and English didn’t seem right and she knew too little of the many strains of Tuamotuan to say anything useful.
Fifteen minutes after their brief service, Ina’s daughter was skipping down to the waves again, finding new jewels, as if death by plastic ingestion were just another inscrutable myth, as mysterious as a god huddled up in a spinning egg before the beginning of the world.
Extracted from Playground by Richard Powers, out now.
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