Category: Books

How to Winter, by Kari Leibowitz (Penguin Life, 272 pages)

When Kari Leibowitz was looking for a research opportunity that would help get her into a top-notch doctoral program, she reached out to Joar Vitterso, a psychology professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. He agreed to become her research partner in studying why Norwegians, despite long periods of darkness and cold, seem relatively immune to the winter blues that so many Americans report.

So despite being something of a winter-phobe herself, having grown up at the Jersey shore, Leibowitz signed up to experience Tromsø’s “Polar Night” —the two months in which the region doesn’t get direct sunlight — and other things she thought would bring her misery. Instead she wound up studying, and ultimately adopting, a winter-loving mindset, which she says is the key to thriving in winter.

In How to Winter, Leibowitz expands on the article she wrote that appeared in The Atlantic in 2015 (“The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise”). Although she soon departed Norway for Stanford University — where winter lows are in the 40s and it hasn’t snowed since 1976 — that article established her as an expert source on coping with winter, and she’s made it a focus of her work since. How to Winter combines her experiences in northern climes with research from Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab on what amounts to positive thinking — reframing how we perceive experiences. Not surprisingly, it’s Leibowitz’s on-the-ground experiences that are the most interesting part of this book.

In Tromsø, which is in full darkness for most of the day between late November and late January (save for a bluish twilight that lasts a couple of hours), Leibowitz found that residents report relatively low rates of seasonal depression. Part of this is because the region is well-equipped for winter. “The city has infrastructure to keep the roads clear of snow and restaurants warm even when it’s blustery outside. Every restaurant and coffee shop has soft lighting and open-flame candles … and cafes often have heat lamps and blankets at outdoor tables so that people can enjoy coffee outside year-round.” At the city’s international film festival, held in January, people watch films outside, and it’s not uncommon for parents to let their appropriately dressed babies nap outside. The first principle of a winter mindset, it seems, is not to be afraid of the dark and cold.

Compare that mindset to the collective moaning and gnashing of teeth that occurs when it gets dark an hour earlier in New England. It’s not that the time change doesn’t have a real effect on our life, Leibowitz writes, but that Americans tend to follow a script about winter misery that begins about that time, rather than actively planning ways to enjoy the season. With regard to the November time change, for example, Leibowitz recommends reducing meetings and commitments the week of the change — seeing it as a time to catch up on rest, make our homes more inviting and cozy and begin pleasurable winter rituals, such as fires or saunas, or what she calls “slow hobbies” like baking, knitting or woodworking.

Animals, she writes, are more in tune with the changing of the seasons that humans are, and this is one reason many of us resist the advent of winter; we haven’t been having to prepare for it, and we expect our well-lit, furnace-warmed lives to go on as usual, rather than make changes. “We pretend we are not animals like any other, as if aligning with nature is a personal or moral failure. But this is a fallacy, and when we look at it plainly, we can see how nonsensical this view is.”

Then we’re told by the media that we’re suffering Seasonal Affective Disorder even though we probably aren’t — true diagnoses range from 0.5 to 3% of the population, and you only have SAD if you first meet the criteria for clinical depression — SAD is a subset of that. So you probably don’t have SAD — you just need a mindset that sees winter as wonderful, Leibowitz writes.

Leibowitz argues that a positive winter mindset is not the same thing as positive thinking, which too often tries to get us to deny the negative. We can’t think our way into its being 80 degrees and sunny when it’s snowing in January, but we can employ “selective attention” to overcome misery. Much of what bothers us about winter is anticipatory — we expect to be cold and miserable if we go outside, when actually when we force ourselves to get outside, it’s often pleasurable and at minimum makes our enjoyment of the indoors even greater when we return. “When we stop pushing against it and observe what it really feels like, asking ourselves, ‘How intolerable is this, really? Am I in danger or am I just a bit uncomfortable?’ the quality of the cold shifts and we find that maybe it’s not as bad as we thought.”

That’s one reason part of her advice to adopting a winter mindset is get outside (“You’re not made of sugar” is the title of one chapter), and she offers research that shows, counterintuitively, that when people do things like cold plunges and winter swimming, they wind up feeling warmer and happier after the shock of the experience.

Leibowitz acknowledges that it’s easier for some people to love winter than others. In Oulu, Finland, for example, known as “the winter biking capital of the world,” bike paths are cleared of snow before roads are. A number of Scandinavian cities have heated sidewalks so people don’t have to worry about falling on snow or ice. Leibowitz travels to places where it’s the norm to have heated floors in bathrooms, individual coat racks next to booths at restaurants and there are even heated toilet seats in public restrooms.

Moreover, she acknowledges, it might be difficult to adopt a “winter is wonderful” mindset if you don’t know how you’re going to pay your heating bill. Not many of us have access to the saunas of which she sings praises. And some of her advice at the end of each chapter is a bit cringy (“Take an awe walk” and “take a family nap”). The book could have been made tighter, and more effective, by icing out its Oprah magazine vibe.

Still, there’s value in much of Leibowitz’s advice, and her travels are interesting. I like many of her suggestions, such as to change the “holiday spirit” into the “winter spirit,” put as much thought into planning January and February as we do December, and instead of trying to force bright light into our winters in defiance of nature, embrace softer lighting and candles (a practice Leibowitz calls “Big Light Off.”) In fact she’s such an effective persuader that even a winter visit to Tromsø is sounding good right now. B

Every Valley, by Charles King (Doubleday, 277 pages)

George Frideric Handel was not the only inspired composer to emerge during the period of time known as the Enlightenment; Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart were also products of 17th- and 18th-century Europe.

But beloved as all of these composers are, it is Handel who reigns throughout the Christmas season, thanks to his preeminent work Messiah.

It’s widely known that Handel composed the music in just 24 days, but there’s much more to the story than that. It took a village, as it were, to create Messiah as we know it today. In Every Valley, Georgetown University professor Charles King examines the players in this story and weaves their stories together, against a cultural backdrop that is not so different from ours as we might think.

“The Enlightenment as most people actually experienced it had fewer wigs and masked balls than we might imagine today, and far more pain and muddling through,” King writes, as he lays out the cultural and economic landscape of the time.

“Politicians and critics traded barbs via pamphlets and cartoons in much the same way that social media works now. Insurrections, riots, and rebellions regularly shook the governing establishment.” Wars fomented, and slavery flourished.

Meanwhile, an eccentric, wealthy bachelor named Charles Jennens — “so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer” — became enamored of the idea that the prophecies and promises of the Hebrew scriptures, coupled with their fulfillment in the New Testament, offered hope for the challenging age and could best be conveyed in a musical performance. He began work on what he called a “Scripture Collection” with the thought that he might engage a past-his-prime composer to set the verses to music.

“At the heart of [Jennens’] work was not so much a statement of faith as a test of will — an affirmation of something Jennens himself had always found hard to believe in,” King writes. “It was the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right.”

King became interested in the full story of Messiah after listening to a 1927 performance recorded in England that brought both him and his wife to tears. He learned that Handel was a celebrated musician even as a young man (in his 20s, his reputation was already such that one person would make the sign of the cross ironically when his name was mentioned). But by the time he was recruited to write this oratorio, Handel was nearing the age of 60, physically ailing and suspected to be past his prime professionally.

King takes us from the early days of Handel’s professional life, from “Rinaldo” and “Water Music,” to the composer’s association with members of the royal family and notables like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. And because King is writing the definitive book on Messiah’s creation, his narrative frequently devolves into side stories of secondary characters, such as the salacious personal life of Susannah Cibber, the woman who would perform the alto solos at Messiah’s premiere and experience a sort of salvation through her association with the work.

These stories, while interesting enough, at times feel a bit like an unwelcome interruption into the most compelling one: the intersection of the lives of Jennens and Handel, men who seem to have needed each other like Woodward needed Bernstein.

Jennens was the epitome of what Americans call “the elite” — he “apparently had no ambition other than to lead the life of a gentleman” and seemed to have been something of a hot-house flower. But he filled his home with books, music and art, creating “a private sanctuary filled with evidence of what the world could be, rather than reminders of what it usually was.” And he had a special affinity for Handel, whom he called “the Prodigious,” and collected all his music with the zeal of your typical American Swiftie.

Meanwhile, an aging Handel was suffering from competition and losing patrons. While an extraordinarily gifted musician and composer, he had, throughout his career, relied on others for “words and stories [he] might render into song.” When he set out to put to music the scripture collection that Jennens had named Messiah, he completed the work in a little over three weeks, but it may or may not have been as divinely inspired as we have been led to believe.

According to King, a statement that has been attributed to Handel about the creation of the “Hallelujah Chorus” — “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself” — is dubiously sourced a century later. (He also throws water on the oft-told story of how audiences came to stand during the Chorus.)

Jennens was not present when Messiah debuted before an audience of about 700 in Dublin, with the proceeds of the night going to a local hospital and infirmary and to pay off the debts of “incarcerated paupers.” It was better-received by the audience, one of whom called it “a species of musick different from any other,” than by the man who had first imagined it, and Jennens later demanded changes, and for a while didn’t want to be associated with it. (He wrote to a confidante, “His Messiah has disappointed me.”)

It’s just as well, as popular history has largely forgotten Jennen’s role, while time has elevated Messiah and its composer to mythic proportions. The original work, which took up both sides of 130 pages, still exists in a vault at the British Library and can be viewed online (and in photographs in this book), ink blots and all.

As for the story of its creation, it’s hard to see how anyone could craft a history more comprehensive than what King has produced in Every Valley although it’s not for the casual reader or the seasonal Messiah enthusiast who lacks an attendant desire to delve into the history of the age. It’s a serious and scholarly work that keeps its distance from the religious ecstasy that its subject inspires, and insists on schooling the readers on European history, whether they’re interested or not.

Moreover, in his curious need to draw parallels to contemporary society, King at times seems to tread dangerously close to political commentary.

However, for those seeking holiday reading that is not of the Hallmark variety, Every Valley hits all the high notes. B+ —Jennifer Graham

What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci (Gallery, 348 pages)

Fame enables so much. If you or I were to propose a book in which we jot notes about what we’ve eaten over the past year, along with occasional asides about what our kids will or won’t eat, and how an airline has once again made flying unbearable, and the friends we’ve had over recently, we’d be pitched in the slush pile. But then again, our friends probably aren’t Robert Downey Jr. and Colin Firth.

And so Stanley Tucci, whose list of credits in Hollywood over the past 40 years has made him more connections than even Kevin Bacon, does get to write such a book, even though it comes on the heels of one that was much more substantial: 2021’s Taste: My Life Through Food. That book was a memoir; his latest is more a journal, and, at first glance, seems kind of scammy. Here’s an actual excerpt from page 90: “I had oatmeal in the [airport] lounge and some orange juice and a croissant. I tried the tater tot things again and they were crisper this time. … Arriving at the hotel, I ordered poached eggs, toast, and sausage, and it was delicious.”

I wish I could say that there were fascinating stories woven around those two meals, but there were not. And yet. The mind-numbing conceit of this book — a foodie records what he eats and doesn’t care whether you find it interesting or not — kind of, sort of, almost works. This is, after all, one of the most likable character actors in Hollywood, who has in recent years become associated with good eating by playing Julia Child’s husband in a film (Julie and Julia) and eating his way through Italy in a documentary (Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy). He has co-owned a restaurant and has written two other cookbooks (The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table).

Maybe he’s just run out of foodie things to say, and the publisher said just keep a journal next year and we’ll buy that. And it isn’t terrible — in fact, in places, it is poignant and heartwarming, particularly when he talks about his interactions with his aging parents. And there are a couple of short, stand-alone essays that are memorable and perfectly timed, including one in which Tucci describes a fan coming up to him in a restaurant and telling him how he used to watch Searching for Italy with his wife, who had recently passed. Tucci, who lost his first wife to breast cancer, knows about grief, and uses the occasion to write beautifully about how is it absorbed:

“It would always be there. Always. But soon, it would become less prevalent. In time her presence would slip into his body, his heart, and his thoughts, sometimes gently, sometimes joltingly, but it would never last for as long as it would today. Eventually, years from now, it would alight on the tip of his soul for just a second or two, carrying with it a shiver of the past and a glimpse of a future that might have been. And then it would disappear again.”

Also, as someone who travels broadly (though tries never to be away from home for more than two weeks at a time), Tucci has a vast and alarming knowledge of things people eat outside of American food courts. The faint of heart may need to skip over the sections about the man who poached a bucket of snakes (“one of the best cooking videos I’ve ever seen,” Tucci says), and about the Italian dish he loves that features a sauce “made with the intestine of a baby calf that is slaughtered while the mother’s milk is still inside of it.” (The name, should you wish to make sure you never accidentally eat this while you are in Rome, is pasta con pajata di vitello a latte. Personally, I’m for making it illegal.)

And on it goes. We get to know Tucci’s wife and children, as well as his parents and some of his extended family, and learn that his daughter doesn’t eat much of anything other than pasta with butter and Parmigiano cheese, which doesn’t bother him because “It has pleased picky eaters and comforted the ailing and the anxious for as long as those three ingredients have been around, which is probably pretty f—ing long. Why? Perhaps because it’s so simple it helps us focus on what is necessary: comfort and health. Eating a simple dish gives one clarity. Pasta with butter and cheese laughs in the face of our complex lives.”

Many of the recipes that Tucci shares here are similarly simple: spaghetti con tonno (with tuna), minestrone soup, and rainbow chard, for example, then he smacks us upside the head with risotto with mushrooms and rabbit legs. All the while, as we read about his trip to Williams Sonoma and a bout with Covid-19 and how he first encountered wild garlic, we are never unaware of the fact that this is a journal — ABOUT WHAT SOMEBODY ATE:

8:30 a.m.: Star pasta with butter, Parmigiano and scrambled egg

10:30 a.m.: Leftover minestrone with a piece of toast

1:30 p.m.: Toasted pita bread stuffed with sheep’s cheese, tomato, and sauteed peppers and onions.

Also, the man never stops eating, and must have the metabolism of those unlucky rabbits.

There is, mercifully, some order to the year, which was, in fact, a complete year, running from Jan. 2, 2023, to Jan. 2, 2024. But it’s difficult to find the big, crinkly bow in which to tie this journal up neatly and to say, “ah, this is why I just read a journal about what a family ate.” I still don’t really know. I learned some things, such as that the British call ground beef mince, and that I will never eat a dish in Rome that ends with a latte. But beyond that, it’s a mystery why it was written, and why I read every word. And it’s a testament to Tucci’s utter likeability that I don’t want those hours of my life back. B-

Bambi, by Felix Salten (Knopf, 211 pages)

If all you know of Bambi is what Disney served up, you don’t know Bambi.

With many of Disney’s early movies, the stories weren’t written in-house — Snow White came from a German fairy tale, attributed to the Brothers Grimm, and Pinnochio was written by an Italian journalist in the 19th century. The source material for Bambi, which Disney released as an animated film in 1942, was a slim novel by the same name written by Felix Salten. It’s been re-released this year as a gold-embossed hardcover book, part of Alfred A. Knopf’s “Children’s Classics” series — which is fine, so long as this elegant, disturbing little book doesn’t fall into a child’s hands. This is not your 5-year-old’s Bambi, and Thumpers in the rear-view mirror are not as they seem.
That said, Salten’s Bambi, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” is better than Disney’s, and I love that the foreword is the original one from 1928, which concludes, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”

Like George Orwell with Animal Farm and E.B. White with Charlotte’s Web, Salten created characters who are fully animal but at the same time quite human. The book opens with an exchange between Bambi’s mother, exhausted from giving birth, and a magpie who keeps chattering about its own life. “Pardon, I wasn’t listening,” Bambi’s mother says after a while, and the magpie flies away thinking, “A stupid soul. Very nice, but stupid,” which, fair or unfair, could encapsulate a lot of conversations we all have in a grocery store line.

Soon enough, as Bambi enjoys his solitary time with his mother they encounter a ferret that has killed a mouse. And a “vast, unknown horror clutched at his heart” as the fawn gets a blurry view of some unknown horror that exists beyond his idyllic life. But his mother is not yet ready to speak of it, trying to keep Bambi innocent as long as possible while teaching him about the joys of the meadow, where “he rejoiced with his legs and with his whole body as he flung himself into the air,” and gazed at the sky, where “he saw the whole heaven stretching far and wide and he rejoiced without knowing why.”

He is introduced to three other deer, one of which, Faline, will become his mate, and catches his first glimpse of his father, who passes the cluster of deer with another proud stag without acknowledging them. Crushed, Bambi asks his mother why; she replies, “They don’t ever stay with us, only at times. … And we have to wait for them to speak to us. They do it whenever they like.”

Bambi’s mother herself grows increasingly colder to her son as he matures, once snapping at him, “Go away and let me be.” When he cries for her, a stag appears and tells him, “Your mother has no time for you now.” And this is before we ever get to the cruelty of man, the hunter, who is described throughout simply as “He.”

The word “Bambi” itself has become Bambi-ized, more associated with cartoon characters and porn stars than its source. But Saltzer’s book, while simply written, is gritty with the hard reality of animal life in which fear and death are constants. In one interaction with a squirrel, Bambi inquires about the rodent’s father, and the squirrel replies, “O, the owl caught him a month ago.” One chapter is a conversation between two autumn leaves, clinging to the top of a tree, contemplating their mortality. (“Can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”)

All this is to say, perhaps this was a “children’s” book when it was first published, five years before antibiotics were discovered and when many people still slaughtered their own meat and death had not been sanitized and swept aside to nursing homes and hospitals. Now, it’s nightmare-inducing stuff, particularly with the running theme of abandonment by parents, and a scene in which Bambi’s “Friend Hare” — which Disney named Thumper — is terrified and writhing in a trap.

In the end Salter’s Bambi is both a coming-of-age story and circle-of-life story, as the deer matures and accepts his role in the forest. Like every good story, it has a clear villain — the human — who is threaded with complexity. He both terrorizes the forest creatures and provides a safe and loving home for his dog, and even cares for an injured deer.

In one scene, a hunting dog and his wounded prey, a fox, have an emotionally charged conversation, the fox calling the dog a turncoat and renegade, since they are genetically brothers. The dog replies, “Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He’s all powerful. He’s above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him.”

And just when you think you’ve got the book’s theological implications figured out, Salter goes elsewhere, because this is, at its heart, a morality tale.

Stephen King once called Disney’s Bambi the first horror movie he ever saw because of its effect on him as a child. That genre doesn’t describeSalter’s Bambi the book, except maybe for vegans. But it’s a deeply affecting little book that, like A Christmas Carol and Animal Farm, shows that the impact of a book has nothing to do with its length. A —Jennifer Graham

Counting Miracles, by Nicholas Sparks (Random House, 368 pages)

I love a good Nicholas Sparks book, so much so that I’m on my library’s automatic waitlist for his new releases. I’ve read them all, and usually I know what I’m going to get: romance, a healthy dose of drama, and possibly a few tears. There is always love, and there is sometimes loss.

Sparks’ latest, Counting Miracles, explores love and loss to the extreme. There are two storylines, very loosely woven together at first and uniting in the end, as such stories do. They’re told in chapters that alternate from the points of view of Tanner, Kaitlyn and Jasper. Tanner and Kaitlyn’s storyline is one — that’s the romance — and Jasper’s is a story all his own.

The book starts with Tanner, a middle-aged veteran, stepping up to help a teenage girl, Casey, who appears to be in trouble with a boy. Moments later Tanner helps her again after she crashes into his car. He kindly drives her home, and his good deeds are rewarded as he meets Casey’s single mom, Kaitlyn, and instantly falls in strong like.

Tanner’s purpose for being in town is to potentially find his birth father after getting a cryptic clue from his grandmother when she was on her deathbed. He still works on that goal, though it’s somewhat put on the back burner for a while as he obsesses over Kaitlyn.

Then there’s Jasper, an older man with a host of health problems and a long history of tragedy. He’s connected to Kaitlyn because he is teaching woodcarving to her son Mitch. When he’s not doing that, he’s living alone in a cabin with his dog Arlo and no family or friends to speak of. When the town is abuzz with news that a rare white deer has been seen in the forest, Jasper makes it his new mission to save that deer from poachers.

The premise of Counting Miracles is finding hope in times of despair, of moving forward when there doesn’t seem to be anything to move toward. It’s uplifting in theory, but Counting Miracles is so heavy on despair that it was hard to push through to get to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, Sparks can obviously tell a good story if he’s making me feel all the feels, but I found myself skimming the darker chapters because they were uncomfortably depressing.

Plus, the darker chapters were the Jasper chapters, and I wasn’t all that interested in reading about his deer-saving adventures, especially since sitting in the woods for long periods of time led to a lot of reflection on the aforementioned tragic past.

Perhaps most off-putting for me in Jasper’s story is the heavy Bible influence. At one point Jasper recalls a tornado that took out his pear tree farm — his source of livelihood. In the present, he recalls staring at the toppled trees and thinking of the ninth verse in the fourth chapter of Job: “By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they come to an end.” But then he reminds himself that “the Lord works in mysterious ways and thought about 1 Corinthians 10:13, which promised that ‘God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength.’” He was losing sleep at that time due to financial worries and considered declaring bankruptcy but instead thought about Psalm 37:21, which says “the wicked borrows and does not pay back.”

All three of the above-quoted Bible passages occur in the space of one page. That’s a lot, and it continues throughout his story as he recalls experiencing, and seemingly continues to experience, the worst life has to offer.

Kaitlyn and Tanner, meanwhile, are going through the typical highs and lows of a potential new relationship. Tanner has never settled down and has plans to leave the country again soon; Kaitlyn knows that and tries not to get attached, and he does the same, but of course they just can’t ignore their infatuation.

You kind of have to suspend reality to fall for a Sparks love story, because his romances often happen quickly. Kaitlyn and Tanner can’t wait to spend time together; their first date is a day at the zoo that Kaitlyn had planned with Mitch, and she asks him to join them. As a single mom myself, I was a little surprised by this, and then annoyed because they didn’t pay much attention to Mitch and instead had deep conversations while following him around. But all Tanner has to do is throw the kid a frisbee later in the date and Mitch is as smitten as his mom.

Casey, on the other hand, is a great foil to their relationship. She’s very 16 and has the attitude to prove it, but ultimately she’s a good kid who wants her mom to be happy — even if she doesn’t always show it.

I was rooting for Kaitlyn and Tanner throughout their ups and downs because they’re likable characters. I wish we heard a little more of Kaitlyn’s backstory and a little less of Tanner’s, because he did a lot of the talking in their conversations, and I felt like I never fully got to know her.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I was always disappointed to leave Kaitlyn and Tanner behind at the end of a chapter to re-join Jasper. I wanted more of their story and less of his. But I know that’s a personal thing; I prefer light and romantic over sad and tragic. And I think a lot of people will enjoy the duality of this novel and how it comes together in the end. It wasn’t my favorite Sparks novel, but definitely worth the read. B —Meghan Siegler , and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A

—Jennifer Graham

Playground, by Richard Powers (381 pages, W. W. Norton & Co.)

Richard Powers is one of America’s most distinguished novelists, and also one of the most daunting. His 2018 novel The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, despite a complicated narrative entwining nine characters. By comparison, his latest, Playground, gives us just four. It still gives the reader a mental workout.

While The Overstory was about trees, Playground is about the ocean and, surprisingly, AI. Its multiple narratives are linked through four lives intricately knit together.

Evie Beaulieu has been obsessed with water since, when she was 12, her father tossed her in a pool of water to test a device that allows people to breathe underwater. She emerged “another kind of creature,” becoming an expert diver with experience far beyond her years, a woman who would rather be on water than on land. She goes on to write a book called “Clearly It Is Ocean” — the title taken from the real-life quote of the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who said, “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly ocean.”

That book was read in childhood by a boy named Todd Keane, who was born the first child of the new year and carried with him for the rest of his life the pressure to always be first at everything. The marriage of Todd’s parents was a train wreck — “My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.”

The manic father, who always needed to be doing something resembling work, drilled his son in games, from Chutes and Ladders to backgammon to chess, even though, like Evie, Todd had a deep connection to water, because Lake Michigan was the place he escaped to in his mind when the household got too chaotic: “When my mind raced and the future rushed at me with knives, the only thing that helped was looking out from the castle and seeing myself walking across the bottom of the lake.”

It is an obsession with games that later connects Todd to the brilliant Rafi Young, a bibliomaniac who has been reading light-years beyond his peers since preschool because of an abusive father who was determined that his children have a better education than he did. Todd and Rafi meet in school and bond by playing chess and Go throughout high school and college, becoming so close that it seems that “our brains are synchronized.” But later they suffer a rift that takes them on vastly different paths.

Todd invents a world-changing online platform called Playground and becomes a billionaire diagnosed with Lewy body dementia at age 57. Meanwhile, Rafi goes on to work for an NGO and to marry Ina Aroita, a native of Hawaii whose life comprises the fourth narrative in this story.

Rafi and Ina make their home on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia. For decades the island had been plundered for its copious phosphate, which helped supply the world with fertilizer and thus food. Once the phosphate mines closed, Makatea’s role in the world shrunk and it was just occasionally visited by wealthy tourists looking for a couple of days of climbing adventure.

But it was now faced with a seemingly existential decision: whether to allow an American company to use it as a port for “seasteading” — the launch of modular floating cities. Aided by artificial intelligence called Profunda, the residents of Makatea are preparing to take a vote on whether to allow this venture to begin.

All of this is just the set-up to the deeper complexity of the novel, which wants us to to think deeply about the unintended consequences of the development of AI and human dominance of the planet as we wade through the events of each character’s life, laid out in constantly changing points of view.

It also wants us to love the ocean like Evie does. It succeeds, with sparkling prose and the insistence that the reader become attached to the characters, who make the case for the ocean through their observations, experiences and passion.

In the opening pages of the book, for example, Ina and her daughter, while beachcombing, come across the carcass of a young albatross whose chest cavity was stuffed with small pieces of plastic: “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.”

Toward the end of the book Powers gets in a dig at everyone who has ever dismissed his writing as too cerebral or complex, writing of Evie’s editor, “The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.”

Despite that, Powers effectively applies a technique that is coming dangerously close to overuse in more populist fare: the plot twist, the sort that makes you want to read the book again, despite its heft.

Powers may limit his audience, and thus his influence, by refusing to write for the masses, but for those willing to rise to the challenge Playground is a wholly immersive experience. It offers a refuge from reality much like the ocean offers.

As Todd reflects, when one’s attention is fixed on a hidden world throbbing with primordial life, “Chicago was nothing. Illinois and even the U.S. were a joke. There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God. The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A