Category: Richard Powers

Five Ways of Looking at a Richard Powers Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Her Fearful Symmetry, Richard Powers

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying, with little success, to clear the decks so I can start reading Richard Powers‘ forthcoming novel, Generosity: An Enhancement. I don’t get status galleys very often, but it’s been taunting me for the past few weeks. Soon, soon. But if my reading time currently has to be dedicated elsewhere, I’m at least glad I recently stumbled over the cache of videos related to Powers novels that were posted by Ninth Letter, a literary journal published at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A few years back, apparently at the prompting of the university and with the help of the art and design department, the journal helped produce short films on Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark, The Gold Bug Variations, The Time of Our Singing, and The Echo Maker. All except the Gold Bug video feature Powers’ own narration; I’m particularly seduced by the one for Galatea, it being the first Powers novel I fell for, but your mileage may vary. Only the video for The Time of Our Singing appears to exist in embeddable form:

Also, the most recent video in the Ninth Letter‘s series is a fun look at the visual work of Audrey Niffenegger, whose next novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, comes out in September.

Summer Reading: A Few Small Suggestions (and One 850-Page One)

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charlie Haas, Colum McCann, Gary Indiana, George Pelecanos, Glen David Gold, Kevin Canty, Lisa See, Richard Powers, Robert Goolrick, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Simon Van Booy, Ward Just

Today’s Chicago Sun-Times has a lengthy list of summer reading suggestions, built on what the book section’s contributors are most looking forward to reading. My pick:

Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just (July 7): No novelist is more sensitive to the different moods of different cities than Just — his 2004 novel, An Unfinished Season, is a modern classic set in Chicago — so I’m eager to see how Vietnam War-era D.C. comes across in Exiles.

I could have gone on, and not only about Just, who deserves to be on the short list of great living American writers but has somehow failed to become a household name among the folks who care about such things. (It may be that Just is perceived as a “writer’s writer,” smart but esoteric, but that’s a limiting, unfair assessment. He’s highly readable, and even his Washington novels aren’t sunk in wonkishness.) There are plenty of books I’m either excited about reading or finishing, or which I’ve eagerly recommended to people in recent months. Among the 2009 books I’d suggest for the beach bag are Robert Goolrick‘s A Reliable Wife, an entertainingly sinister tale of a love triangle in the Wisconsin wilderness; Gary Indiana‘s The Shanghai Gesture, a riff on old-fashioned Fu Manchu stories whose satire cloaks some genuinely felt concern about current-day helplessness in the face of globalization; George Pelecanos‘ The Way Home, another morality tale about a neglected corner of D.C. life, this time the products of juvenile correctional institutions, that’s bolstered by its precise characterizations and Pelecanos’ increasingly stripped-down style; Simon Van Booy‘s Love Begins in Winter, a collection of elegant, ghostly, yet never melodramatic love stories set in Stockholm, Las Vegas, Quebec City, and other far-flung settings; Charlie Haas‘ The Enthusiast, an easygoing comic novel about an editor in the curious world of niche magazines; and Yoshihiro Tatsumi‘s A Drifting Life, a magnificent sprawling memoir from the manga pioneer that explores the nature of creation, the business of art, and the frustrating path to self-awareness. (At 850-plus pages, that last one probably won’t work well for the beach bag, which probably speaks to my lack of knowledge about what works well for the beach. I’ve never been much for the outdoors.)

Like a couple of my Sun-Times contributor colleagues, I’m looking forward to Thomas Pynchon‘s Inherent Vice (though there’s plenty of Pynchon I’d like to get to before that one), but I’m just as interested in Colum McCann‘s portrait of New York City in the early 70s, Let the Great World Spin, Lisa See‘s Shanghai Girls, Glen David Gold‘s Sunnyside, Kevin Canty‘s story collection Where the Money Went, the re-publication of Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s 1968 cult novel, Nog, and Richard Powers‘ Generosity: An Enhancement. That last one doesn’t come out until October, but that’s the funny thing about book reviewers—one of the best things about summer is looking forward to the books that come out in fall.

Links: Stranded

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Elizabeth Bear, Harper Lee, Laura Lippman, Richard Powers

Vanderbilt University’s Jay Clayton teaches a class that I wouldn’t dream of skipping: Biotechnology and Culture: From Victorian Eugenics to Contemporary Genomics, whose syllabus includes Middlesex, Cloud Atlas, White Teeth, Blade Runner, and a whole lot more. That gobstoppingly excellent reading and viewing list is bolstered by a fine blog that’s currently drilling into some plot points of Richard Powers‘ The Gold Bug Variations. (via)

If you’d prefer a primer in the basics, Yale University has posted 26 videos of Amy Hungerford’s course in the American Novel since 1945.

In the Daily Beast, Laura Lippman posts an good list of five of her favorite works of fiction, which includes books by Jack Pendarvis, Philip Roth, Kate Atkinson, Megan Abbot, and Herman Wouk. (Haven’t heard a plug for that last author in quite a while.) (via)

I don’t have the patience to read all the squabbling, but apparently fantasy author Elizabeth Bear launched quite a kerfuffle about racism in her genre.

Which has, in turn, prompted an assertion by an anonymous industry insider that publishing in general has a race problem.

The Second Pass, a new Web site dedicated to reviewing new books and revisiting old ones, has just launched. Looks promising.

The NEA’s Big Read honcho, David Kipen, promises he’ll eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if he can’t get all 128 residents of Kelleys Island, Ohio, to read the book. (I picture a tragic scene where the last holdout, after hours of browbeating, breaks down in tears and cries, “I never learned to read!”) This should come in handy for prep work:

Richard Powers in Sequence

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Powers

The latest issue of GQ has a feature by novelist Richard Powers, who agreed to have his entire genome sequenced to a) learn more about the process and b) see if he’s at serious risk for any diseases. As for a), it’s clear that getting our entire genomes mapped is becoming cheaper and faster, privacy issues be damned. As for b), if you can tolerate GQ‘s clunky web site, which breaks out the story onto 21 pages, the whole thing is worth your time. A sample:

I ask [George Church, director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School] if genomicists will ever be able to look at a person’s alleles and deduce something about his or her temperament. I have in mind the novelist’s territory, those mysterious components—warmth, spontaneity, humor—that, however uncomfortable it makes us to admit, seem to be somewhat to largely heritable. Will a genetic signature ever help us understand the origin of high-level behavioral traits? Church gazes off into the distance, with that look of pure experimental pleasure. “Well, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between high-level behavioral traits, low-level behavioral traits, and physical traits,” he says. “They’re all physical, in some sense.”

(via)

Best Business Novels?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Gary Krist, Herman Melville, Richard Powers, Saul Bellow, William Gaddis

Last week New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera blogged about his efforts to find a great novel about business written in the past 25 years. That didn’t work out very well for him—hey, who’s the joker who recommended William Gaddis‘ JR?—but he did prompt a lively discussion about great nonfiction books about business.

On that front, I raised my hand to suggest Steven Bach‘s Final Cut, still the most fun I’ve had reading a book largely involving dollar signs. But I remain stuck on the fiction thing. About five years back I worked on project for Business 2.0 about the most important books about business; Biz 2 is dead now, and the full article is gone to wherever Time Inc. mothballs such things, but a list is here. Yeah, we were probably reaching by putting Moby-Dick in the “leadership” category, but there’s some good stuff in there: Gary Krist‘s Extravagance, Don DeLillo‘s Cosmopolis, Saul Bellow‘s Seize the Day. I’m not sure why Richard Powers‘ Gain didn’t make the cut, because I’m certain I suggested it—it’s one of my favorite novels of the past 25 years, period. (Granted, it’s about the rise of a pharmaceutical giant that’s responsible for the lead character’s cancer, which isn’t the sort of thing a national business mag would want to promote. My editors weren’t big on my suggestion of The Road to Wigan Pier.) Any others? I’m thinking of novels that explore the big churning wheels of American business; Mark Sarvas has already collected a nice list of novels that explore office life.

Powers vs. Jobs

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Powers

Lucky folks in Seattle get to see Richard Powers speak and read a short story on Wednesday night. There’s a quick Q & A with him in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and it reminds me that Powers’ plots can seem forbidding on paper but often are quite elegantly turned. (“Often,” not “always”–I couldn’t hack it through Prisoner’s Dilemma.) Here’s the plot summary:

It’s about music in the iPod age and what happens to old music (in that age). It’s a kind of quartet for four voices about a virus that’s aimed at portable music players. It’s a fantasy, but those types of viruses do exist. I just create four different people with four different musical tastes, on the advent of this event, and what the appearance of the virus does to these people’s need for music.

If it was anybody but Powers writing this, I’d be terrified.