Richard Powers interview: ‘As a child, I was sure I was going to be an oceanographer'

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

For much of my childhood, I was sure I was going to be an oceanographer. I lived in Bangkok, and I often spent my weekends and summer holidays snorkelling in the South China Sea. Fifty years later, following the death of my older sister, a chain of memories sent me back to those years. The reefs that we swam in then were mostly gone. Playground began as a meditation on what had happened to that 99% of the Earth’s habitable space, the ocean, in the short span of that half a century. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

When I was 15, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest electrified me. The story was so defiant and the prose so playful and performative that it ripened my nascent preadolescent sense of rebellion and turned me into an insurgent overnight. Up until then I had read mostly non-fiction. That book made me aware of all the insights and emotional truths that only fiction can reach. Oddly, my next big obsession after Kesey was Thomas Hardy! Go figure. 

The book that made me want to become a writer  

I suppose that must have been Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I read it the summer after my freshman year in college, when I still thought I would graduate with a degree in physics. That book put me in an altered state of consciousness for weeks. It’s effect on me it was so visceral, making me feel everything from sexual desire to the physical nausea of protracted disease. I never for a minute thought I would ever be able to come anywhere close to reproducing its magic effect. But for the first time in my life, I wanted to try. Shortly afterwards, I changed my college major. 

The book that changed the way I think about the novel  

That would have to be Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Imagine what it was like to be 16 years old, obsessed with science and math and history, and then have that rocket come crash into your world. I had nothing to compare it to – no explanation of how it worked or where it was going or what its endless, surreal vignettes meant or how the whole astonishing structure fit together. More than any other book I’d ever read, that one convinced me that with enough energy, invention, and sheer mental passion, a novel could make its own rules. 

The book that impressed me the most – the closest I’ve read to the ‘perfect’ novel 

‘Perfection’ is a problematic category and a moving target. It’s an ideal that I aspired toward when I was younger but now seems a little dangerous to me. At 67, messiness has become just as valuable. And yet I do love books that possess a sublime combination of wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams comes to mind, a novel without plot or characters, fashioned entirely out of poetry and thought. 

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I just finished Kawabata’s Snow Country, and I am still living with that feeling of being trapped in a waking dream. I wonder if this book has ever been compared to Kafka. The weird conflation of photorealism and pared-down cartoon really haunted me. The gritty psychology, fabulist setting, and elliptical story all collide and leave the book floating outside time in the most evocative way. It reads like a novel-length haiku. 

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

The older I get, the less comfortable I am prescribing any book to anyone, let alone everyone. But I would be confident in telling many kinds of readers about the power of D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (shortlisted in 1981). Although it is dense with erudition and historical detail, it unfolds like a gigantic fairy tale, and its final reveal, which depends upon remembering forward, turn the book into a profound meditation on human desire, human perversion, and the unending catastrophe of the 20th century.