A common criticism at the time was that Powers was writing “think pieces,” not novels—“More head than heart,” as the writer Jim Holt put it in a review, in 2014, referring to it as the “Powers Problem.” But Powers viewed himself as someone inspired by the great twentieth-century European novelists, such as Proust, Mann, and Musil, or American novelists like Pynchon or Gaddis, whose work reflects the large-scale changes in the world. He tried to balance his astonishment at technological revolutions with a novelist’s vision of what might come to pass in their wake. He believed that many writers in the nineteen-nineties presumed that we had “beat nature,” he said. Struggles were focussed inward: “Can we get along with each other? Can we get along with ourselves?” The tendency of novels to root conflict largely in psychology, and to offer deep introspection as a way out, struck him as troubling, cutting us off from the nonhuman.
“He was misunderstood for a decade or two,” Kim Stanley Robinson, one of contemporary science fiction’s greatest writers, told me. Robinson has devoted his career to exploring the interplay between the natural world—and its possible impending collapse—and culture. He draws a distinction between his novels, which are speculative and future-oriented, and Powers’s, which come from a more grounded, realist tradition. “Modern critics didn’t know what to do with him—‘Oh, he’s so cerebral.’ They weren’t able to define him, because he actually wrote about scientists, ideas, and work. It doesn’t always have to be about people’s soap operas and domestic, bourgeois, modern American life. He’s just interested in larger, more systemic things, and his novels are about those things.”
Powers’s reputation for braininess belied the fact that his books often featured small glimpses of his personal history. On the final pages of “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Powers seems to step into this swirling, playful novel about the Hobson family and the tales that their father, who recently succumbed to cancer, once told them. “I have had an idea for how I might begin to make some sense of the loss. The plans for a place to hide out in long enough to learn how to come back,” the narrator observes. “Call it Powers World.” “Operation Wandering Soul” borrows from his childhood in Thailand, and “Galatea 2.2” from the circumstances of his return to Illinois after nearly six years in Europe.
These connections were likely lost on reviewers and readers, since Powers was largely an enigma. His books didn’t feature an author photo until “Galatea 2.2,” in 1995, and he didn’t go on tour until 1998, with the release of “Gain.” “I just thought, I don’t really know how to drive this thing yet,” he said. “I think it would probably be better if I allowed myself to mature in isolation. Figure out what you’re doing before a lot of other people tell you what you’re doing, or what you should be doing.”
A couple of years ago, Powers’s older sister, Peggy, passed away unexpectedly. While recalling their childhood, he recovered a memory: for his tenth birthday, she had given him a book about coral reefs. From his bedroom in Chicago, “it felt as if earth was two impossibly different planets”—the concrete-and-steel one just outside his window and the oceanic abyss far beyond. He never learned why she gave him the book. But the following year they were living in Bangkok, and he was snorkelling alongside all the creatures he’d previously only read about. The recollection inspired him to try writing a novel that would examine how much the oceans had been transformed in the fifty years since his sister had given him that present. “The largest part of the planet exhausted,” he writes, “before it was ever explored.”
After dinner, we walked through midtown. It was warm out, the time of year when New Yorkers begin looking toward summer, and Manhattan had a jagged, anarchic feeling to it. Powers told me that he was far more comfortable in the solitude of the mountains. As we walked through Madison Square Park, he found it hard to ignore the city’s distractions and distresses. “I’m hearing a lot of particular sounds I wouldn’t have been attentive to otherwise,” he said. A man on a bench began screaming about Anthony Fauci. “That’s hard for me,” Powers said quietly. (“How funny,” Patchett said, laughing, when I mentioned our dinner. “Rick in New York.”)
Cartoon by Liana Finck
It was still early enough in the cycle of publication that few people had read “Playground,” and he kept asking me about my response to it—what parts I’d found compelling, whether the novel had made me cry. Many of his books had helped people come to terms with panicky uncertainty regarding the future. As we passed some people playing chess in Union Square, he reflected on a book that had recently helped him deal with that terror himself: “Homo Ludens,” published in 1938, by the Dutch theorist and historian Johan Huizinga.
“Homo Ludens” is essentially a celebration of play. When we are young, play teaches us about freedom and pleasure, boundaries and order, the difference between real life and fantasy, what works and what doesn’t. “Play is older than culture,” Huizinga writes, and it is fundamental to culture’s twists and turns. Powers began to see the engine of evolution—“life’s way of testing, training, and extending itself”—as play.
In “Playground,” the characters Todd and Rafi cement their friendship with the Chinese strategy game Go, whose history stretches back some four thousand years. Although they’re competitive with each other, it’s the game’s complexity, the numerous possibilities in every decision, that appeals to them most. They can play a single game all night. A theme of “Playground” emerges: What if the point of life isn’t to win but to keep surviving, together? “We play to keep on playing,” Powers said triumphantly, raising a finger to the sky before disappearing into the evening crowd.
Powers spent much of the nineties and early two-thousands in Urbana, at his alma mater, where he had returned in 1993 to teach creative writing and continue writing fiction. Researching novels allowed him to explore all kinds of curiosities—music, psychological disorders, corporate history, cancer cells, the history of racial segregation.
In 2010, he was hired as a writer-in-residence in the creative-writing program at Stanford University, and in 2013 he was given an endowed professorship. Powers probably had a more open-minded and sophisticated view of Silicon Valley than many novelists his age. But he recalled attending dinners in California alongside tech entrepreneurs who seemed to have it all but were still fixated on correcting what they saw as the “design flaw” of life: death.
Meanwhile, life on earth was growing ever more precarious. “I would go up into the Santa Cruz Mountains whenever I could, to escape this vision of the future being created down in the Valley,” he said. He didn’t know much about the woods. Everything was “a green blur” to him. One of the first trees he learned about was the bristlecone pine, within driving distance, which had “germinated before human beings invented writing,” he said. He admired the natural world’s seeming indifference to our inventions and innovations.
He collected hundreds of books on trees and began working on what would become “The Overstory.” In 2014, he left Stanford and returned to Illinois. In 2015, he decided to visit the Smokies, after reading about the untouched, old-growth forests there. It was a revelatory experience: the light, the smells, and the sounds were unlike anywhere he’d been. For months, he thought about the region. The next year, he moved to Tennessee.
Powers lives in a modest house in the mountains; he settled on it the first day he went looking. (His wife, the translator Jane Kuntz, splits her time between the Smokies and Urbana, where the couple met. They have no children, owing in part to his anxieties about bringing life into an imperilled world.) It feels a bit like an adult tree house: there’s a screened-in porch that runs along one edge of the house, with a telescope, some DVDs, and a bed where he sleeps when the weather permits. Inside, there are books in every room, though the bulk of his library remains in Urbana. In a corner of the living room is a small hydroponic table for growing salad greens and herbs, which he set up during the pandemic. Throughout the house are old awards and also gifts from his book tours, including a set of bricks that an admirer decorated with paintings of Powers’s covers. When I visited him, he looked at a topographical map of the Smokies and traced the mountain ridges with his finger, marvelling at how much was left to explore.
“Being able to think on the time frames of trees reduces my anxiety,” he said. (He joked that his anxieties could be inflamed by more short-term sources, such as being profiled for magazines.) When I asked him where he wrote “Playground,” he looked around the house. “Everywhere,” he replied. His process involves a combination of dictating, typing, and writing by hand—depending on the nature of the scene—and he estimated that he wrote about eighty per cent of the novel while lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, trying to get as close as possible to sensory deprivation.
