Powers puts out a giant, brainy book every couple of years. With each one, hearing the title and the premise, I've thought that this might be the one, the book I have been waiting for, from him or from anyone. His titles are marvelous, idea-heavy: Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, Gain. And his premises hold the promise of ingenious, enlightening construction, of fully worked out systems. Gold Bug weaves Bach's variations (and two love stories!) together with the four simple notes of the genetic code; Galatea has a precocious novelist named Richard Powers spoon-feeding the Great Books into a growing Artificial Intelligence named Helen. Gain, with the best setup of them all, follows two main characters: a real estate agent with a malignant cyst in her ovaries, and the family soap firm-turned-multinational corporation whose chemicals may or may not have caused her cancer. But no book yet of his has lived up to these tempting details. Gold Bug lost me along the way, and Gain was moving and ingenious but somehow too contained by its neat premise. Nevertheless, I continue to hope that the next one, or one of the old ones I haven't read yet, will finally be the be-all, end-all Richard Powers book that I have been looking for.
Plowing the Dark, his seventh and latest novel, attracts because it's about some of the hot-button issues of the day: machine-constructed realities, global Americanization, William Butler Yeats. And it takes place in our very own little lumber town made good. The story alternates between an international dream team of smarties brought together in the Eastside suburbs to do some high-powered VR R&D, and a blindfolded American held in a series of blank rooms in Lebanon by an Islamic sect. (Like his hair, which is split into neat, rationalist hemispheres, Powers' plots are often divided in half.) The two stories don't touch until the final scenes, but the connection between them is clear: The virtual worlds projected onto the blank screens of the Eastside studio echo the scenarios the solitary hostage struggles to imagine (or merely remember) in his empty, white-walled prison.
The Seattle side of the book is driven by the disgust and wonder that Adie, a New York artist brought into the VR team, has for the power of the new machines that mimic reality. She joins a multinational cast of specialists assembled by TeraSys, a Microsoft stand-in with more money than it knows what to do with, who are given the money and machines to create the Next Big Thing to transform human consciousness. They want right-brain Adie along because they need someone who can "see." It's a Seattle story, but only in the sense that Seattle has become one of the global sites where knowledge workers accumulate without ever leaving the caves in which they work. Like tourists, the characters make a single visit to the Space Needle, to Pioneer Square--the spots they know just as well from TV. Their Seattle is the one played out in office parks that look like dentists' offices, where lonely former adventure gamers and home coders, locked away in their rooms for an extended adolescence, suddenly find themselves at the center of things, "warlocks taking to the surface without a single, unsuspecting non-gamer quite knowing the shape of the new rules or the size of the global coup."
Powers often gets lumped with Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as smart boys who write big books and know science, but Powers is the only one of them who actually likes science. DeLillo and Pynchon are horrified by it. They can do the equations, but they don't trust them. Powers can certainly do the equations--without any scratch paper--and at some basic level he trusts them and believes that they might answer our problems. Although he knows it's probably a pipe dream, he still holds out the hope that art, love, suffering, etc. could all somehow be traceable to a common internal code. (He also differs crucially from DeLillo and Pynchon in that, well, they are funny and he is not. Oh, he makes jokes, lots of them, but they are nice, logical jokes, not the existentially unsettling, something-is-deeply-wrong-with-the-world gags that make the other two such a cold-blooded hoot. Powers knows something is wrong with the world, but he won't make jokes about it: It's too serious for that.) His writing gets almost clumsy with the amount of information and allusions he wants to include, the connections he wants to draw between art and biology, between physics and love, between everything and everything else.
As any scientist knows, the first step to setting up your experiment is deciding which factors you will take as given. Economists assume that people are fully rational, that firms are profit-maximizing. Pollsters assume that everyone answers their questions truthfully. Powers simplifies his narrative equations by assuming that everyone is brilliant. He peoples Plowing the Dark with a collection of the smartest and most talented in every field (the artist, the coder, the mathematician, the economist), who perform, at least intellectually, at the optimal Moore's Law level. (Maybe it's easier to believe in such people if you are one of them yourself.) Unfortunately, all the characters think and talk like Powers does. Like him, they look to science for their metaphors, they drop well-read allusions to history and art and evolutionary biology, they recite memorized stanzas of poetry. I love a good monomaniac as much as the next fella--I mean, everybody in Kafka's stories sound the same, too--but Powers' single-mindedness skews his experiment. The main tension of Plowing is supposed to come from a conflict between the machine language of TeraSys and Adie, a technophobic artist who has never owned a TV and is afraid of wires. But Adie's is a false naiveté. She thinks and talks like the others (that is, like Richard Powers), which makes her rapid conversion to the wonders of virtual reality somewhat underwhelming. Here's Adie trying to imagine what the insides of the machines driving their virtual world look like: "She could form no clearer picture than streams of signals, waves and troughs rushing down narrow silicon sluices, each one setting off another massive cascade of signals. Somehow these signals all lined up, countless dots in a cosmic halftone process, the hammers of a trillion player pianos, the programmed nubs on the drum of a galaxy-sized music box." That doesn't sound like someone who had "whimpered" "Liquid? Crystal?" a few pages earlier, when faced with an onslaught of tech jargon. Powers' style, which can't resist being technically astute and densely allusive at all times, ends up tainting all the petri dishes in his lab.
Powers gets some things exactly right, especially about the new corporate information culture, the "vibrant organic fascism, [the] sunny assumption of omnipotence" of the Ecotopian Northwest. "Hey," Adie's fellow knowledge workers call to her in the confident corridors of TeraSys. "Hey. The quick facial dip of acknowledgment: you're creating, I'm creating. We're at the peak of our assembled powers, joined together, about to set in place civilization's crowning capstone." But for the most part his version of the virtual falls short. His wisecracking cosmopolitan specialists never outgrow their national or occupational stereotypes to become much more substantial than the cardboard crew of Twister. The fantastic artificial environments they create, which Powers describes with slack-jawed lyricism, are constructed with such a perfect ease that they only come across as glossy and dull. Even the parallel story of the man isolated to the point of delirium in his Middle Eastern cell, meant to ground these flights of technofancy in the facts of human suffering, seems, for all its earnest exactitude, to have been pulled mainly from the news of such ordeals that we have all heard.
Since Plowing the Dark didn't turn out to be the Richard Powers book that I keep hoping for either, I continued my search as I was preparing my list of gripes for this review, grazing back to Galatea 2.2, the earlier novel I had always wanted to read but had never gotten to. And, lo, there I found it, waiting for me on the HarperCollins backlist; the book in which Powers' wide-ranging smarts and his keening sentimentality find their subject. Like Plowing, Galatea is about making a machine mimic real life, and about whether that imitation can become real. But while the virtual world in Plowing seems mostly to be built via a generous waving of the hands, Galatea follows the growing intelligence of the machine named Helen in believable, fascinating detail. And, more fascinating, Powers pins this academic exercise onto his own sweet, searing autobiography. He makes his main character a novelist named Richard Powers, with four precocious novels under his belt and a busted 10-year relationship, reading the literary classics and confessing his sorrows to the infant machine. That self-reflexive twist, and the passionately clinical way Powers flays open his own past, like a doctor giving himself yellow fever to see if he can cure it, lets him put his usual polymath ambition and earnest heart in perspective while still giving them free rein. I fell for it in a way that made me almost forget the Seattle book he just wrote.
So go back to the shelves and get Galatea. That's the one. You know enough about Seattle already.
