For the last three decades, Richard Powers has been bringing out hefty novels at the rate of one every 2.5 years: 11 in all. At his current age of 56, he is, as a novelist, midway on life’s path; presumably he has another 11 or so novels still in him. Powers has won a National Book Award and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; he has been the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant”; he has elicited lavish praise from the critics — most of them, anyway. Two of the words most frequently employed in connection with his literary output are “cerebral” and “ambitious.” “Cerebral” refers to his tendency to lace his novels with scientific and scholarly themes, like artificial intelligence in “Galatea 2.2,” game theory in “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and musicology cum genetic recombination in “The Gold Bug Variations.” “Ambitious” refers to his penchant for fashioning narrative structures and symbolic networks on a heroic scale…In “Orfeo,” the ideas have to do (again) with genetics and music. The life is that of an avant-garde composer named Peter Els, who, as the novel opens, is a washed-up 70-year-old living in a college town in Pennsylvania. Peter, we learn, has had a lifelong passion for abstract patterns — patterns that, he fondly hopes, will allow him “to break free of time and hear the future.” He once pursued such patterns in the realm of experimental music, only to leave audiences nonplused by his innovative compositions. Now, in his solitary retirement, he has moved on to DNA. In his kitchen he has set up an amateur genetics lab. Using equipment ordered from online biopunk shops, he is trying to manipulate the genome of a common (but not necessarily harmless) bacterium, Serratia marcescens. His goal is to splice musical patterns into living cells…. Throughout “Orfeo” we experience tonal patterns of all kinds — from bird song to the overtone series of a single piano note to the “caldera of noise” at a John Cage happening and the “naked pain” in the Largo of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony — filtered through Peter’s lyrical consciousness. In one of the novel’s most virtuosic passages, which goes on for a dozen pages, Peter dilates on the transcendent beauties of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” composed and first performed in the brutal conditions of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. All of which heightens and makes unbearably poignant Peter’s own losing struggle to “recover a fugitive language” that might capture something of eternity. -- Jim Holt, January 2014, New York Times Sunday Book Review
Posted on: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 15:07:38 +0000
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