Richard Powers (and What Gave Rise to Words to Begin With)

Nov 13, 2025

About two-thirds of the way through Richard Powers's Playground, the reader accompanies the pioneering ocean scientist Evelyne Beaulieu on a life-changing, trailblazing diving trip into the WWII wreckage around Truk Atoll (Chuuk). It's a fabulous scene. Before the arrival of the wreckage, the lagoon was mostly sand, mud, and "a half dozen species of algae that grew in meadows a foot high."^[1] The worlds of Truk in the wake of the wreckage is something altogether new:

Injecting hundreds of planes and scores of ships into this pastureland was like dropping a city down into an endless cornfield. Truk had become a series of living caves, causeways, and canyons--the largest manmade reef on the planet. The stacked decks and spiral stairways of the ships, the gun barrels and batteries, the signal bridges and chart houses, the lower decks filled with engine rooms ... created every imaginable kind of neighborhood: hundreds of biomes where there had been just one.

As Beaulieu swims deeper into the wreckage, every turn reveals a new riot of life had made the graveyard its home, sometimes including "kinds of life that would never have gotten a foothold without the carnage." It is an adventure of abundance: an abundance of man-made stuff merging with the abundance of ocean life, swaddled in an abundance of mood, a feeling of eerie surrealness. What does such excess add up to?

Wonder. Bewilderment.

Powers pulls out every writerly trick he has to bring all of this life to life for the reader, but the best tool in his toolbox might be time. There are about four pages here that simply follow Beaulieu through the wreckage, the reader effectively seeing what she sees. Beaulieu's expertise is mirrored by the narration's chronicling of sea life, her blindspots recognized by letting certain images and objects be uncertain or "cryptic."

Lists are never a bad move for hinting at abundance, and there are a lot of them here, one often blurring into the next. In one paragraph, a description of the range of colors becomes a list of colors becomes a list of fish, until you get this wild sentence:

Parrotfish, groupers, cardinalfish, gobies, two-tone darts, wrasses, blennies, scorpionfish, jellies and other cnidarians: she couldn't begin to name all the colors.

Taken in one reading, you would be forgiven for thinking that the names of fish had become colors in that sentence; you might even want to argue, "but those aren't colors!" But the collapsing of the diversity of species and the diversity of color is the point, just as the collapsing of the distinction between the manmade and the natural world is key to the overall scene. (Perhaps there is a point where the act of marking difference - listing long rosters of species, chronicling the specifics of WWII detritus - constructs a space wherein those differences more easily blur?)

⊕ I can imagine some readers seeing this extended passage as four pages of description, and I can hear the shudder from some of my students who find such lingering not just unnecessary or boring but almost immoral, undemocratic. I've always relished it, even as a kid, which is surprising in that I don't really visualize what I read, except with great effort. So it's not that the images here - expertly rendered by Powers - become wondrous moving images in my mind. I think I enjoy these sorts of passages because of the way the feel of the language can bring the image to life for me, more than the particular visual. In this case, coupled with the natural world -- the spell of the sensuous, indeed.

But there are also just terrific images: "a brass ship's throttle" looks "like some wild Miro sculpture caked in starfish and worms," while shrimp darting "through the hidey-holes of the jumbled metal" look like "animated Christmas cards"; the arrangement of pipes and gauges around an air compressor make it look like "a robot from a dark and silent future."

Anyhow, I stopped to blog this because it reminded me of another scene from Powers, this time in The Overstory: Maidenhair and Watchman (Olivia and Nicholas) exploring Mimas, the enormous old-growth redwood that they take up camp in order to keep it from being felled by loggers. They are up there for weeks, giving Powers ample space to explore the world of such a tree, and of the larger forest it anchors, from a vantage point we don't normally see.

The first morning after sleep, they wake to see that world for the first time, and the effect is cosmic:

They look together ... the view cracks open his chest. Cloud, mountain, World Tree, and mist--all the tangled, rich stability of creation that gave rise to words to begin with--leave him stupid and speechless. [...] All around them spreads a phantasmagoric, Ordovician fairy tale. It's morning like the morning when life first came up on dry land.^[2]

But the mystic eventually gives way to an exploration similar to that of Truk in Playground, this one less eerie and marked a bit more by play. Everything they find is new and unexpected: a patch of huckleberries, bugs new and strange, even a small lake with "tiny crustaceans" and salamanders. "How did a damp-seeking creature with inch-long limbs climb two-thirds of the length of a football field, up the side of dry, fibrous bark?" They let go of their fears of falling, practically dancing as they move across the branches.

That comparison to the football field is important, because size is important as Powers tries to make the unimaginable make sense. Where their platform is in Mimas, the two of them are "most of the way up the Flatiron Building," and the forest floor from that viewpoint is "a dollscape a little girl might make out of acorns and ferns." It is only being up so high that allows them to really grasp the size of not just Mimas but of its neighbors, of the forest it is a part of:

Here and there, solo spires rise above the giants' chorus. They look like green thunderheads, or rocket plumes. From below, the tallest neighbors read like mid-sized incense cedars. Only now, seventy yards above the ground, can Nicholas gauge the true size of these few old ones, five times larger than the largest whale. Giants march down into the ravine the three of them climbed last night."

These passages, of Playground and The Overstory, are of course quite different in the end, in part because these explorations are parts of different stories: the extended stay of Maidenhair and Watchman in the latter means that we see them not just having this revelatory experience but living in it. The revelation is less concentrated, spanning several weeks. With Beaulieu, the journey is packed into a few dives, woven together by Powers into what feels like one day's adventure.

But they bring the reader into a very real space - this is not science fiction - that, despite its reality, we cannot easily access, a space that is as much about perspective as it is about the physical place and its features. ⊕ This is a key theme of Playground, the oceans vastness not just in space but time, and the relationship of that vastness to human history. 'The mainspring of life would go on ticking, driving the gears of evolution, oblivious to anything that humans got up to above the surface. To the entities down there in a place as dark and hostile as outer space, life on land could come and go. Khruschchev might lob a few nuclear warheads at Eisenhower on Ike's way out, provoking Dulles's 'massive retaliation,' and life at the bottom of the Mariana would not skip a beat.' (117-118) In doing so, Powers, through his characters, gives you a chance to explore: the upper stories of trees and their expansive worlds in Overstory; in Playground, the persistent ecosystems of the oceans, for whom the wreckage of humanity is just a drop in an impossibly large story.

But a word of celebration for those scenes that stay with you, that make you think something anew. I was actually souring a bit on The Overstory's plot when Mimas came in and swept me off my feet, and the characters' exploration of the upper worlds of the tree became my own. There are plenty of wonderful extended explorations of the ocean in Playground prior to this scene, certainly, but Beaulieu's dive at Truk has already left a similar impression.

Header photo is "Kensho Maru - Corals, Chuuk 2009" by Stephen Masters, CC BY 2.0.