In 2016 the novelist Amitav Ghosh published The Great Derangement, which asked how contemporary writers should go about depicting climate change in their work. One of Ghosh’s contentions was that the realist novel as we know it—the thing that most of us have been reading in one form of another since the nineteenth century—isn’t equipped to deal with the vastness of an issue like the Anthropocene. Two years later, as if in answer to Ghosh’s question, the novelist Richard Powers published The Overstory, a novel about redwood forests and the fungal interconnectivity of trees that went on to win the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Big spreads in the New York Times and long interviews on NPR spotlit Powers as a leading literary voice sounding a klaxon call on behalf of the planet, urging us to attend to what we’re losing before it’s too late. In 2021 he published Bewilderment, a father-son tale set in a dystopian future ravaged by climate collapse. Now we have Playground—longlisted, but not shortlisted, for this year’s Booker Prize—the third entry in Richard Powers’s turn toward the climate change novel.
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