Orfeo by Richard Powers

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'We're already us'

Generosity

by Richard Powers

Powers has featured on this blog a couple of times and is a writer I am always interested in as his background in physics means that his novels are always likely to test the grey cells. The flip side to a combination of literature and science is that he can sometimes test your patience too, the literature sometimes suffers at the expense of the science, but when it works (most notably for me in The Gold Bug Variations), there is something genuinely invigorating about being pulled in lots of directions at the same time. His last novel The Echo Maker may have won him the National Book Award but I found that examination of identity through Oliver Sacks-like neuroscience a slightly slow and depressing read. His latest seems a far cheerier proposition: What if there was a gene for happiness?

In America his latest novel is not subtitled as such but instead ": An Enhancement" which relates I think not only to the contents but also the style in which they are presented. The authorial voice is hard to pin down at first, breaking directly through the text to address us and speaking of the central character, Russel Stone, as if he were not the very person writing the book, which he is.

'I can't see him well, at first. But that's my fault, not his. I'm years away, in another country...'

Stone becomes a teacher in Chicago, tutoring in creative non-fiction and it is amongst his class that he encounters Thassa Amzwar a Berber refugee from Algeria, who seems to radiate a happiness not in keeping with her troubled family history and flight from death and danger.

She's shorter than Stone thought. She's wearing a kind of needle-work, coral-colored shift. She could be from southern Italy. But her round face shines with precisely the light he remembers, the flushed look announcing that the most remarkable thing has happened to her, just now, down this hall, outside this building, on the streets of this improbable city. A thing that redeems everyone, for years to come.

Could there be some genetic cause to this seemingly unbreakable optimism? At first Stone assumes that she is on some kind of new medication (the world we are in is one where mood enhancers come in pill-form, where it is assumed everything will one day be treatable) or perhaps giddy from her trauma. The first hurdle for Powers is how to create a believable character from such a set-up but he does well, not only in describing her attitude but in showing the impact on it from what happens when others discover her gift. In such a society she could be a seriously valuable commodity and one man looking for just such a person is Thomas Kurton, a geneticist who has been working on the genetic basis of happiness and only needs the perfect subject to prove his hypothesis. This develops effectively into a struggle between the two men for what Thassa offers, although of course this isn't something that she actively offers, aware of its value, just simply who she is and that she chooses not to withhold.

Powers does a brilliant job of commenting on his society, a slightly enhanced version you might say of our own. For Stone, who has learnt to his cost the power of his own words once they're in the public domain, the current fascination for transparent social lives and a total loss of privacy leaves him feeling protective.

But even as he shrinks from it, the world graduates to runaway first person. Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafes, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even warzone journalism all turn confessional. Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.

In such a society you can imagine the media circus that kicks into action once they get a hold of Thassa. A medical marvel, a living prophecy, a foreign danger; there are many ways she can be interpreted and her appearance on America's largest talk show, Oona (think of an Irish-American Oprah and you have the idea), provides the moment that creates her myth and allows Powers again to critique the speed of modern communication. Her moment of near meltdown and recovery becomes a much copied and parodied YouTube sensation.

"Oona, listen," a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect recreation of the segment. "I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious."
A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, "People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful."
Atlanta: "Even a minute is more than we deserve." Spokane, Allentown: "No one should be anything but dead." San Diego, Concord, Moline: "Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing."
"It's easy," all the Thass Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who'll listen. "We don't need to get better. We're already us. And everything that is, is ours."

Getting back to style, that strange authorial voice is the result of Stone's rehabilitation as a writer. His romantic relationship with a counsellor encourages him to put pen to paper again and we are ostensibly reading his own creative non-fiction, his rendering of events. Some sections begin 'So there's this scene...' for example and at other times the interjections are more blatant, stressing all the time his failure to make the most of his material.

I'm caught like Buridan's ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can't quite make out what I'm to do with them.

Quite a frank admission from an author and one that the uncharitable might use against Powers rather than Stone at times (Buridan's ass if you didn't already know (I have my own hand in the air here) is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. So now you know). There are also still those moments where scientific language is used to describe the scientific thinking of his scientific characters and you wonder whether scientists really think like that (Goose bumps run up Kurton's neck - piloerection, puffing up against danger - archaic reflex pirated by that spin-off of no known survival value: awe). As I've said before, Powers isn't to all tastes, but there's no doubting his willingness to tackle not only big science but also the big themes that spin off from that. The dryness of facts and reason are often counter-balanced by the very human mistakes people make trying to find love or companionship. Order runs alongside disorder and with Generosity he has written a book which dares to take a look at some of the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human and even where that very idea comes from.

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voice of the nation

The Time of Our Singing
by Richard Powers

I have a lot of time for Richard Powers (and with the size of some of his novels you need it). The Goldbug Variations remains one of the most stimulating books I have read. Stimulating because through its dense prose and heavy science there was so much that got my brain firing and all of it structured perfectly with the precision and beauty of a piece of music. Reading his other books has always been an educational experience but they have always seemed to fall short of the emotion and transcendence achieved in that first one I read. I was hoping that a return to music would provide me with an opportunity to sing his praises anew. I should first say that this is a vast book, bursting with ideas and with a non-linear structure, thus making a cogent, comprehensive review almost impossible. So bear with me.

This novel combines the themes of race, music and the general theory of relativity in a narrative which jumps back and forth through time almost to demonstrate the ability of time to fold back on itself. At its core it is a family saga, a family created from the unlikely pairing of David Strom, a German Jew, lucky to have escaped his homeland in the run up to war and Delia Daley a young black woman. They meet in 1939 during the concert performance of Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial. It seems a fitting event for them to meet at a performance itself the result of racial prejudice. The spirit it embodies will have an impact on how they chose to live their lives together during this period of American history so important in terms of race and civil rights.

"A lightness rises, a way point in this gathering sea of dark, the darkness that belonging itself has made. For a moment, here, now, stretching down the length of the reflecting pool, bending along an arc from the shaft of the Washington Monument to the base of the Lincoln Memorial, curling down the banks of the Potomac behind her, a state takes shape, ad hoc, improvised, revolutionary, free - a notion, a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be. This is the place her voice creates. The one in the words that come back to her at last. That sweet, elusive thee. Of thee I sing."

Delia is a singer, barred from professional success due to her colour but together with David she begins a family that they hope to raise 'beyond colour' schooling them at home. Jonah, the eldest boy, is a prodigiously talented singer. His brother Joe becomes his accompanist and baby Ruth is also a talented singer. But these three children will take very different trajectories in life. The two boys forge a career in lieder recitals and Ruth rejects her talents after a family tragedy and becomes politicised, joining the Black Panthers. There is conflict along the way between Delia and her parents about her methods of raising her family and this comes to a head when her father, Dr Daley, takes exception to David's involvement in the development of the atom bomb (the use of which he sees as a racist act). It is a split from which they never recover. Powers shows later with gut wrenching emotion the consequences of this divide between Delia's parents.

Following such a period of history means that we witness those landmark events such as the Watts riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and the Kennedy brothers, the Million Man March and the fall out from the Rodney King beating and trial. Powers works hard to conflate these experiences to show that history is ever present. David tells his sons 'the secret of time': 'Now is nothing but a very clever lie'. This results in a brave and original ending to the novel which brilliantly brings the story full circle, tiying it together within the fabric of time itself.

This is not a book free of faults. It is too long, but I can imagine an editor finding it hard to know where to apply the red pen. Powers could also never be accused of being a beautiful prose stylist but he certainly has his moments, particularly when describing those flash points of violence, or the power and emotion contained in mass gatherings. He also writes well as I have said before about music and there is plenty of it here, again covering a vast period of time from medieval chants to modern day rap. But perhaps the stongest parts of the book are where he succesfully connects to the full emotions contained within any family which suffers division, disappointment and grief. The three Strom children, raised initially in a self contained paradise, safe from the attacks of prejudice, are all affected in different ways by America's struggle through time to deal with race in all its colours.

When David and Delia first meet she tells him 'how it's all impossible, their seeing each other again. A mistake, to think any story ever finishes.' and Powers shows quite brilliantly in this extraordinary novel how progress; both socially, politically and through time itself is an illusory concept. But it doesn't stop us trying. As David, a man who has lost his entire family before the book begins, tells his sons 'You two will be anyone you want.'

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By George, she's got it

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

Richard Powers' most recent novel The Echo Maker won last year's National Book Award in the US and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of Mark, a truck driver who wakes from a coma after an accident and believes that his sister, who has returned home to nurse him, is an actually an imposter. Reeling from this rejection she contacts renowned neurologist Gerald Weber who recognising the rare Capgras Syndrome comes to investigate. It is filled with sound science, dense prose and a meticulous dissection of human life and thoughts; in other words exactly what you would expect from Powers. His writing is not to all tastes but at its best, as in The Gold Bug Variations, which combines genetics, music, and computer science, it can be some of the most invigorating and challenging writing available.

Whilst still waiting for some books to be delivered after the postal strike I have been stumbling into second hand bookshops and following my nose. On one such recce I found a copy of Powers pseudo-autobiographical novel Galatea 2.2. It concerns a certain Richard Powers who returns to his old University, after the end of a relationship with a former student, stumbling along in a state of limbo disillusioned with both reading and writing. Whilst there he meets Philip Lentz a combative computer scientist who convinces Powers to be part of an experiment. He has made a bet with fellow scientists that he can produce a computer that can perform literary criticism which is indistinguishable from that written by a human. Powers task is to 'teach' the computer.

This is very clever update of the Pygmalion myth. The various implementations of the machine develop into 'Helen' who is capable eventually of asking what sex and race she is, even what she looks like. Powers is consistently amazed at how his pupil seems to be developing consciousness, but is slow in realising that the real subject of the experiment is himself. As he introduces her to a history of literature it is her who is helping him to re-engage with the world. Told in parallel is the story of the relationship which has rendered Powers so disconnected at the start of the novel. Refered to only as 'C', theirs was an insular relationship built on the books they read together. In the present day Powers fixates on another student, this one known only as 'A', who becomes for him a new, improved version of 'C' and also the student against whom his 'Helen' will compete. All very clever as I said and that of course is the problem.

It isn't that the writing is dry or cool or clinical although on discovering that Lentz has scoliosis it is difficult to relate to Powers thinking:
'I was sorry I'd let him get under my skin. Even someone who has modeled the function of the inferior frontal gyrus might still be plagued by the monsters that gyrus modeled'.
Powers can still provide a great one-liner like:
'He looked as if he'd taken self-tanning cream orally'.
He can also write with great emotion, particularly when describing the death throes of his relationship with 'C' or the visits with Lentz to see his wife Audrey, reduced to a paranoid shell of herself by dementia. But where structure leant such strength to Gold Bug, the four notes of the music combining with the four parts of human genetic code, shedding light on each other, this novel is far less succesful, the connections between plots misfiring like faulty synapses in the brain. Picking it up each time I felt I was starting again, needing to tune my ear in to the prose. Powers melding of science and literature is bound to work better in some places than others, where this book works best is as a very imaginative way of writing about writing again when you think you can't. Through the pursuits of this fictional Powers in creating his Galatea and looking back on what has helped and shaped his writing so far, the real Powers is able to write again and bring us Galatea 2.2, inspired by the voice that commands him to 'See everything for me'.

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