Powers compared to Pynchon in NYRB

[Doug Millison]

"Powers, just into his forties, is most often described by critics as an
epigone of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo-the brightest kid in a class that
includes the likes of David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan
Franzen. And Powers does share with these writers a taste for narrative
experimentation and an almost disturbing braininess. But unlike these
writers, Powers is, at heart, a realist. The dizzying narrative
permutations of Wallace or Pynchon are spun from the inner logic of
storytelling; their novels are like self-enclosed perpetual motion
machines. And one feels, encountering them, a rather chilled admiration:
they move, all right, but they don't move you. Powers, in contrast, for all
the cold precision of his intelligence, is a disarmingly emotional writer,
and not afraid of moral passion. I'm told that Operation Wandering Soul,
his unsparing novel about a doctor who works with terminally ill children,
is taught in medical ethics courses. It's hard to imagine Infinite Jest or
The Crying of Lot 49 being put to similar use."
--A.O. Scott, knocking down a straw man in "A Matter of Life and Death," a
review of Richard Powers' _Gain_, in the 17 Dec 98 issue of _New York
Review of Books_. (The article is in the NYRB Archives, searchable by
author, article title, etc., at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/archives.html




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