The Author as Science Guy

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
The Author as Science Guy
By EMILY EAKIN

URBANA, Ill. — Richard Powers wrote his new novel,
"The Time of Our Singing," in bed, using a wireless
keyboard to beam his prose to a giant computer screen
across the room. 

The contraption broke down a month ago, but Mr.
Powers's reserves of electronic hardware run deep.
There is a desktop monitor on the swivel stand next to
his bed; on the coffee table in his living room lies a
gleaming, featherweight laptop that deciphers his
longhand and even takes dictation.

"I'm like a guitarist who wants to play in a different
style, one with very fast action, one with nylon
strings," he said during an interview at his cozy
clapboard home in this quiet university town. "Each
arrangement produces a different physical relationship
to the medium." 

Not every novelist takes such unabashed delight in the
machines he uses to tap out his prose. But Mr. Powers
is, as he ruefully puts it, "the science guy." At 45,
this tall, thin, bluntly handsome and appealingly
unpretentious man is widely considered the country's
pre-eminent literary chronicler of the technological
age. Lately, however, that reputation has come to seem
less an honor than a curse.

In seven hefty previous novels, each tautly structured
and dense with ideas, Mr. Powers has delved into the
arcana of molecular genetics, artificial intelligence,
virtual reality and game theory, teasing poetry and
suspense from unlikely sources like Bach piano
variations, the four nucleotides of DNA and the neural
networks of a thinking computer. His books, which
include "The Gold Bug Variations" (1991), "Galatea
2.2" (1995) and "Plowing the Dark" (2000), have earned
him enviable accolades (he's a MacArthur "genius"
grant winner and a perennial finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award), as well as a cult
following in academic circles and flattering
comparisons to establishment heavyweights like Don
DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.

But the praise has been accompanied by nagging
doubt.... Even admirers complain that he is more head
than heart. His characters, they say, emit no human
pulse. They are too clever, too abstract, mere voice
boxes for ideas. Like the computers he writes so
eloquently about, his books are virtuosic mausoleums,
storehouses of knowledge devoid of sentient beings.

It hasn't helped his case that Mr. Powers has tended
to shun the public eye.... "I wanted the books to
speak for themselves," he says — but the effect was to
seal his reputation as a disembodied voice, a
reclusive intellect. 

To such charges, "The Time of Our Singing" (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux) would seem a provocative rejoinder.
It's a sprawling, poignant novel about race, the story
of a musically talented, mixed-race family whose
desire to live beyond the color line is thwarted by
the intractable prejudice and cascading violence of
postwar America....

There is even a token scientist ....

Once again, critics are impressed. But not all are
convinced that Mr. Powers has successfully bridged the
head-heart, science-art divide....
 
Mr. Powers puts a brave face on such assessments.... 
Yet the head-heart debate clearly galls him. "It's the
most abstract and artificial dichotomy in the world,"
he said. "But once in place, nothing I could put on
paper could change it." 

[...]

.... "He's brilliant beyond measure," said Michael
Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State
University, whose wife and sons were the inspiration
for characters in "Galatea 2.2." ....

Happily, Mr. Powers said, literary tastes do change.
The appetite for what he called "the authenticity of
the street," which pervades much contemporary fiction,
will inevitably give way to make room for new
conventions.

But literary taste may never catch up with the
polymathic Mr. Powers. In the end his endlessly
cogitating characters may simply be too much like him,
and the array of demanding subjects that he stuffs
into a single book too overwhelming for an impatient
public....

[...]

... as a physics major at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, Mr. Powers discovered computers
years before most everyone else. In 1975 he was
studying physics and chemistry on the university's
Plato network, a precursor to the Internet, and
teaching himself how to program. Computer code was a
revelation. "Before I understood in literature that
transformation into living things, I was doing it in
code," he said. "Type a few lines of code, you create
an organism."

That powerful, morally loaded conceit reverberates
through much of Mr. Powers's fiction, from "The Gold
Bug Variations," in which life and art (the human
genome, Bach's Goldberg Variations) come to be
understood as the product of the most ephemeral of
codes (four nucleotides in the case of DNA, four notes
in the case of Bach) to "Galatea 2.2," in which a
character named Richard Powers collaborates with a
neuroscientist to create, from lines of code, a
thinking, singing, feeling machine.

[...]

Literature, Mr. Powers understood early on, was — like
DNA or software — another sublime, transformable code.
But though he went to complete a master's degree in
English literature at Urbana, he didn't think of
writing fiction until 1980 ....

Mr. Powers has managed to live off his writing since
then, thanks in part to a couple of generous monetary
prizes but also because of a natural inclination
toward asceticism. He spent several years in the early
1990's living with a Dutch girlfriend in a village in
the Netherlands, and after they separated, a year in a
converted garage in rural Long Island, where he made
do without car, television, credit card or Internet
connection. "Until I was 42, I could fit everything
that I owned into two suitcases," he said. 

Lately that's begun to change. In 1996 he was awarded
an endowed chair at Urbana, where he teaches creative
writing. In 1999 he bought his first home and, to
obtain phone service, acquired a credit card....

[...]

"I've been dictating more and more," Mr. Powers said,
flipping up the lid of his laptop to reveal a page of
notes for his next novel, a book about memory.... "My
goal for technology has always been to reach a point
where the technological mediation becomes invisible,"
he said, a touch of wonder in his voice. "Now I can
compose the way Wordsworth used to, wandering around
the Lake District."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/books/18POWE.html

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