Richard Powers appeared on CBS Saturday Morning to discuss his latest novel, Playground.
Powers’ novel, published last week by Norton, tells the story of four people who meet on a French Polynesian island whose residents have been asked to approve a proposal to use their homeland to build floating cities. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book—a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize—as “an engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.”
Jeff Glor, making his final appearance on the show, traveled to Tennessee to interview Powers, who lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Powers, whose books often explore the natural world, told Glor, “I was reading a lot of literary fiction that never dealt [with] anything except us. I would read a 300-page novel and there would be no suggestion that anything except the human world existed.…It started to become clear to me that we need stories that break the hold of that culture, that can say, No, we’re not individuals. No, we’re not separate from everything else.”
Glor asked Powers if he was more interested in writing about nature or technology.
“I want to tell stories that see us as a small part of a huge set of processes and to make that not frightening, to make it full of possibility,” Powers responded.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
