Playground: A Novel

While Todd is the narrative center of the novel, Rafi is its emotional core. The figure of Rafi emerges from Todd’s memories. Todd intricately illustrates the extent to which Rafi’s father influenced him, especially given that both their fathers infused their sons with a hypercompetitive streak that shaped their lives. Rafi’s father felt alienated by society, so he compelled his son to be better educated than everyone else. Rafi is a young African American boy from a poor neighborhood, but his father drives him hard to become smarter than all his peers. Rafi understands the extent to which his father blames his misfortune on racism. Almost as a rebuke to his father, Rafi rarely expresses himself in the same way. He grows up in white schools with white friends; he occasionally references racism sardonically when mocking the more privileged Todd. Thus, Todd becomes Rafi’s focal point for expressing his father’s unresolved sense of injustice. Rafi doesn’t have a venue to voice these lingering resentments, nor does he have many people around him (especially after his sister’s death) to understand such matters. Similarly, Todd becomes the focal point for his father’s competitive nature. By beating Todd at their games, Rafi finds a way to channel the energy his father infused into his character, an energy that he has always struggled to comprehend. The games that Rafi plays with Todd, such as chess and Go, become more than just games. They’re the way that Rafi measures himself against white society and his father’s expectations.

Occasionally, Rafi refers to Albert Camus’s interpretation of The Myth of Sisyphus. In this retelling of the classic, Sisyphus takes pleasure in pushing the boulder up the hill every day. The struggle against the inevitable is, Camus suggests, enough to give meaning to Sisyphus’s life. This interpretation of the classic myth becomes increasingly important for Rafi as he delves deeper into academia. He has always taken pleasure in reading and researching, but the writing process becomes more important to him than any finished product. He prefers to constantly edit his poems, searching for a perfect means of self-expression, rather than publishing them. To Rafi, the process is what’s important. He explicitly likens himself to Sisyphus, which is why he becomes so frustrated when Ina and others urge him to finish his postgraduate thesis. Each time they pressure him, they show him that they don’t understand that he’s more content to work than to finish because the finishing invites judgment. Rafi has found a place where he’s comfortable (drafting a thesis), and his loved ones do nothing but try to move him elsewhere.

Fundamental to the portrayal of Rafi, however, is Todd’s construction of the character of Rafi through the essays, memories, and documents that he can assemble about his oldest friend. He then feeds these into the AI device as prompts for the creation of a comforting, cathartic story. The Rafi on Makatea isn’t the real Rafi, but an AI creation built from Todd’s interpretation of Rafi and his problems. Thus, the depiction of Rafi following his argument with Todd is even more scattered. The novel relates this important, tragic period in Rafi’s life through posts on Playground or pleading letters from Ina. To Todd, this era of Rafi is inscrutable, so the AI device must fill in the blanks. The depiction of the artificial Rafi (a version of Rafi on the island of Makatea, long after he died in reality) is entirely fictional. This is Todd’s attempt to satisfy Rafi’s dream of resurrecting the dead, as Fyodorov foretold. However, Todd once again misunderstands his friend. The striving toward the Common Task, the unity that results from the collective effort, is the real reward of Fyodorov’s philosophy. Todd misinterprets this as simply using technology to make computer-generated versions of his dead friends, AI models who can assure him that he did nothing wrong. Todd once again fails to understand how the process is more important than the product, and that Sisyphus can be happy pushing the boulder. In resurrecting Rafi, Todd uses a computer to move the boulder to the top of the hill, not recognizing the importance of the task itself. Since the audience must rely on Todd for the depiction of Rafi, the portrayal is misleading.

A young artist of French Polynesian descent, Ina Aroita spent much of her early life moving between Army bases since her father was in the military. This leaves Ina with a sense of dislocation, the feeling that she’s always far from a home that doesn’t quite have a fixed location. This is why her relationship with Rafi becomes an important part of her life. In Rafi, she finds a fixed point of reference. Their profound affection and love give her a home for the first time in her life, even if that home isn’t a physical place. In the novel, however, Ina often serves as a plot device for Rafi. As she finds a home in him, he finds something valuable in her. For the first time in his life, he experiences uncomplicated, non-transactional love. Rafi loves Ina, yet he doesn’t tell her everything. He shares certain secrets only with Todd. When Todd tells Ina these secrets, Rafi feels betrayed and ends their friendship. Thus, Todd demonstrates how his friendship with Ina was in some ways even more profound than Rafi’s relationship with her, until the moment when Todd broke everything.

The novel’s unfolding from Todd’s perspective is important because Todd can confess to the audience that he loved Ina. Even if he never acted on this love, he envied her relationship with Rafi. He envied what she offered Rafi and resented how she pulled his best friend away from him. The love between Rafi and Ina (as portrayed from Todd’s perspective) is so pure and gratifying that Todd can never enjoy romance because he compares every relationship to Rafi and Ina’s. Todd never finds his own Ina, which illustrates how she becomes more than just a character. For Todd, in his retelling of their lives, she represents unattainable love. Like her artwork, Ina becomes a totem to a lost idea of love. Just as Ina feels disconnected from her cultural identity, Todd uses her to demonstrate how he becomes disconnected from people after losing those who mean the most to him.

Todd’s AI device imagines a world where Rafi and Ina can be together. The Makatea version of Ina is informed entirely by Todd’s memories. She builds a sculpture from garbage that notably resembles the work she showed to Todd and Rafi many years earlier. This Ina is still preoccupied with cultural disconnection, and she’s still devoted to Rafi, an apparent continuation of the person Todd knew years ago. The novel only briefly alludes to the intervening years between Todd’s final communication with Ina and her appearance on Makatea, because Todd lacks information from which to construct this version of Ina. As such, she’s as artificial a creation as Rafi or Evelyne. Notably, Todd mentions his plans to leave his vast fortune to Ina. The artificial Ina mentions this and wonders what she’ll do with all the money. The AI device imagines that she’ll turn the French Pacific into a nature sanctuary, but since Todd is gone and the memories that fuel the AI device are no longer available, the novel leaves this question unanswered. Of the core characters, only Ina is alive at the novel’s end. Whatever version of Ina is left alive, however, isn’t the version that readers know. Like so much about Ina, her real character remains a mystery.