Reading the heralded fiction of author Richard Powers is like entering an amusement park, though not one operated by Disney or MGM. It’s more the Encyclopedia Britannica Theme Park. Or Six Flags Over Compton’s.
Powers’ brainy but accessible novels offer mind-bending rides through regions most of us have not explored since the forced march through freshman general studies: biology, classical music, physics, mathematics, photography, folklore, computer science, genetics, literature, history, art and beyond.
This is a writer whose 1991 novel dealing with the mysteries of DNA (“Gold Bug Variations”) was structured according to the composition of the Johann Sebastian Bach masterpiece “The Goldberg Variations,” with allusions also to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.”
All this urbane brilliance radiates from a tall, skinny, bespectacled author who, though born in Evanston, attended high school in De Kalb, the point of origination for an eponymous brand of seed corn, barbed wire and Cindy Crawford.
“Unfortunately, I was nine years older,” Powers said.
De Kalb’s next great huskless, barbless, moleless contribution to the world appears to be this writer, who downloads information like a high performance, mega-RAM truck.
“He must have a photographic memory,” said an awestruck colleague.
A cellist who studied physics, Powers, 38, obviously has both hemispheres of the brain fully engaged. And he has the papers to prove it. In 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.
Literary critics seem to have difficulty finding lofty-enough praise for Powers, who is now an artist-in-residence here on the University of Illinois campus.
Powers is “among our most prodigious young novelists, and without a doubt, our most cerebral,” according to a Publishers Weekly review of his latest book “Galatea 2.2.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Released in mid-June and already hailed as one of the Top 10 books of the year, Powers’ new novel appears to be up to the remarkable standard set by his first four works, three of which were finalists for the National Book Award.
Like his previous works, the latest is so chockablock with amazing cogitation that even the reviews beg for a Webster’s:
“With each sentence carefully crafted, this profound meditation on poetry and physics, theories of epistemology, and literary hermeneutics also asks, amazingly enough, what it means simply to be human,” extrapolated Kirkus Reviews.
All of this critical wolf-whistling should not be interpreted to mean that he is an intellectual snob.
“Be careful about making him seem forbidding,” cautions Powers’ friend and fellow Urbana author Philip Graham. “When he comes over to our house, he plays hide and seek with our son. He is literally down on his hands and knees playing. He has a very, very good sense of humor. And he is a real lover of fun.”
Powers has said he aims for both the head and the heart in his writing, and critics are agog over his accuracy with both targets. Yet while most reviewers have praised Powers’ writing, some whine that they have been spoonfed sparse helpings of personal information about him. And so, like Michael Jackson on the defensive-offensive, Powers is always having to deny insinuations, while his actions invite them.
“I’m not a recluse at all. . . . I don’t avoid publicity, I just have never promoted myself,” he said.
He doesn’t do book tours or book signings. In the early going, he refused to have his photograph or any personal information included in his books.
It wasn’t that he was teasing the literary establishment. He simply didn’t feel confident enough to “take the show on the road,” Powers said. “I was still trying to figure out what writing was all about.”
He still refrains from book signings because he finds it troubling that some collectors and retailers consider a signed book as “more authentic” than one without the author’s signature.
In recent years he has granted more interviews, and in them he gladly spills his visions of the cosmos but hangs on to personal information like a downed pilot. He wants readers to take his stories as presented, without filtering them through what they’ve read about his life, loves and choice in toothpaste.
Inquiring minds may want to know that he now lives alone in a writerly rented carriage house apartment behind a writerly Victorian house on a writerly street in Urbana. He has art. He has music. He has hardwood floors. And although during a recent interview there the place appeared to be extremely kempt for a bachelor-artist pad, odds are there was dirty laundry hidden in there somewhere.
Speaking in paragraphs
As mentally challenging as it is to read Powers’ books, that experience doesn’t compare to the Thunder River Ride of interviewing him.
At least in print, when you bump into Bach and then biogenetics you have the option of back-paddling over Powers’ whitewater streams of interdisciplinary arcana. In person, the easy eloquence of his speech, not to mention the depth of his database, is downright dizzying.
In conversation, his words and images jut up unexpectedly from all sorts of deep-lying sources, ping-ponging the listener’s mind across all four lobes, sparking synapses that haven’t felt a surge since that unfortunate childhood incident with an electrified farm fence.
“Rick speaks in paragraphs,” marveled Graham. “He’s really a polymath, a person very well-versed in a number of different fields. It’s fun talking to him. You are on a roller-coaster ride. And it’s a challenge to do the back and forth at that level of discourse.”
Powers fires off intellectual ruminations like Robin Williams doing an oral doctoral. He just keeps coming at you but with smarts instead of schtick. s
“Rick is not manic like Robin Williams, but he does make those intuitive leaps. Not for comedic effect, necessarily–although he is funny–but more on an intellectual plane,” said Graham. “It is intellectual pinball with him, going from one angle to another, and being exhilarated on the ride.”
In “Galatea 2.2,” Powers taps first into ancient Greek mythology before plunging the reader into cyberspace. The Cliffs Notes version of this brainteaser might describe it as a computer-literate reworking of the Pygmalion myth. (You know, “Man carves beautiful statue, man falls in love with statue, man tries to bring statue to life.”)
Relocating the myth from Greece to the U. of I. in Urbana, Powers recasts the Pygmalion sculptors as a cognitive neurologist trying to build a computer modeled on the human brain with the aid of a heartsick writer-out-of-water named, yes, Richard Powers.
“It’s a little gamble setting myself up as the protagonist, but for people comfortable with Postmodernism it will be OK,” said the non-fictional Powers.
He cautioned that this work “is not a straight literary memoir,” although it does offer “a somewhat familiar plot of midlife crises and looking for somewhere to turn.”
The book is not as serious as its author makes it sound. At one point, after firing off a shameless pun involving lab monkeys and dismemberment (“Rhesus pieces”), author Powers sends protagonist Powers into a boozing pack of elitist university scientists who deride him as a member of the lightweight literati.
“If he throws up, we’re going to have a million and a half words all over the table,” one of the scientists snorts.
Such eggheaded playfulness is splattered all over “Galatea 2.2.”
Like a literary cowbird, Powers also commandeers the nests of his Urbana friends in the book. While reading it, Michael Berube, a U. of I. faculty member whose commentary and writings appear in Village Voice and Harpers, discovered that Powers had cast his two young sons and his wife in the book. But Powers had mercilessly written Berube himself off as a dastardly deserter. Powers apologized to Berube, explaining to his friend that he had to knock off the father for plotting purposes.
Even the town of Urbana is shanghaied in the novel. Powers accurately notes that the “sleepy hamlet with the two-dollar movie theater and the free corn boil at summer’s end also sheltered a National Supercomputing Site . . . the most advanced, block-long cybernetic wonderland that a paranoid race to preserve faltering world dominance could fund.”
On the move
The fourth of five children now “scattered all over the place,” Powers was 11 when his father, a school principal in Lincolnwood, moved the family to Bangkok. “He’d put in 20 years, was vested, and looking for adventure,” he says in a polite but curt summation that is typical of his responses to questions about family members.
After only a few years abroad, the family moved back to the States but this time settled in De Kalb, a college town in the cornfields beyond the western-most suburbs.
Following high school, Powers enrolled as a physics major at the Urbana campus. But after two years he switched to the rhetoric curriculum, specializing in the sciences.
He graduated in 1978 with an “A” average and entered the school’s master’s degree program in English. He got that degree in 1980 and then moved for three years to Boston, where he worked as a computer programmer and wrote.
He returned to Urbana in 1983 as a teacher in the creative-writing program. From 1987 until 1992 he lived in Heerlen, a coal-mining town in the southern tip of the Netherlands. In spring 1992 he was artist-in-residence at Sussex College at Cambridge University in England.
Those who read his books, particularly the latest one, will find clues to many of those moves, some of which were tied to his romance with a former student whose parents were Dutch immigrants to the U.S. His somewhat nerdy pursuit of female companionship provides a subplot to the new novel in which Powers seems to have all of the social confidence of Dobie Gillis.
“In my few daylight hours, I fell in love with women constantly. Bank tellers, cashiers, women in the subway. A constant procession of pulse-pounding maybes. I never did more than ask one or two to lunch,” he writes.
Looking at the big picture
Powers said he considers the new book “an aerial survey and summation, a rounding out” of his life since his first novel appeared 10 years ago.
“Galatea 2.2” also studies “the relationship between individual life and the big picture, the role of private experience in the public sphere, and technology in the changing relationship of the two spheres,” he said.
The primary theme of this book is found in a line from it, “We live our lives as a tale told,” he said.
And so, when reading about protagonist Powers and his loneliness and sadness over a failed relationship with a former student, the reader can gauge whether it is fact or fiction–keeping in mind another line from the book in which the fictional-Powers-the-fiction-writer says, “Lying constructively is my job description.”
The one true Powers said he approaches his writing as an 8-to-2 job. He generally writes from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then spends most of the rest of his working day editing his writing and doing the ample research required of his cross-lobing novels.
Urbana, with its university library and its supercomputing lab, has all the research resources, all the pizza-delivery joints and, perhaps most important, all the quiet Powers needs to explore the nature of the conscious universe, while absorbing it too.
“You want to write with minimum noise. . . . I love the restorative quiet this place can give you. But I can go anywhere when I need to.”
