Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations

Richard Powers is an author who proves that being an autodidact sometimes comes at a steep price. Each of his novels revolve around an important or timely science-related question, dealing with such varied problems as genetic decoding, virtual reality, the cancerous affects of cosmetics and the chemical industry and mental health. These subjects are inevitably well-researched, often exhaustively so, and embedded into the nuts and bolts of the story in meaningful, and interesting ways. Metaphors concerning the subject abound, and a strict technical vocabulary is introduced, and then used, in ways that show the clear dependency of character upon topic. Richard Powers' narrators are often lonely, highly intellectual people who have, through the vicissitudes of the plot-that-happens-before-the-novel-starts (a favourite technique of Powers), come recently into some sort of melancholy, be it grief, loss, or the sudden abandonment of certainty. There is a boy- or girlfriend (rarely are his couples married) waiting in the wings, either an old flame or a new, and they generally provide an interesting parallel to the true subject of the novel – the research.

Enter The Gold Bug Variations, an early work of Powers' that tackles DNA sequencing, the complexities of AGCT and the genetic code. Along with this, of course, is music – particularly Bach's Goldberg Variations. Powers, as he does, deals with two separate but rapidly approaching storylines, the first set in the 1950s, when American genetic research convulsed ecstatically following Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-helix model of DNA, and began to produce an astonishing outpouring of research that continues to this day; and the second story, set in the 1980s, as two young lovers attempt to unravel the past of their older friend and work-mate, Stuart Ressler, who was one of the more promising scientists in the fifties, until he suddenly vanished and reappeared as a low-level IT professional. More accurately, the first part deals with genetics, and the second with libraries, their role as facilitator and organiser of knowledge, and the difficulty language has expressing that which matters most.

I say more accurately, because, as is too often the case with Powers' earlier novels, the characters take a backseat to the research. Stuart Ressler, the young geneticist turned programmer; Franklin his workmate and sometime philanderer; and Jan O'Deigh, librarian, a woman who proves remarkably adept at answering obscure questions. We know little about them when the novel begins, and about as much as when it ends. Oh, the biographical details are there (age, marital history, food likes and dislikes), but nothing, really, about who they are as people. I can't imagine meeting any one of these characters in the street, and while that may not be a requirement of good fiction, it is when the author is trying to make it so. The three are created to be multi-dimensional, complicated people, but they remain static and unimpressive, their personalities non-existent, their emotions petty and misguided.

But readers tend not to look to Powers for intricate emotional reasoning. Instead, it is about the research, about the concepts and the problems. Here, then, is an example of what can be gleaned when a page is opened at random: “Some variant of the self-rewriting program succeeds everywhere. Imperialism lies at the heart of my classification problem: life is as particular as each locale it has a foothold in. Any nomenclature I consider founders on the cartographer's one-to-one scale solution to 'How many places are there?' The program ports itself to all four corners, stopping to seed every intermediary, drive by the universal firmware kernel buried inside it. Nothing exceeds like success. Excess of issue. Surplus of offspring. More applicants than vacancies. Overproduction – duplicate, superfluous: waves of generations testing themselves against the landlord. The milt of trout turns whole streams milky.” Okay, but what does all this mean, really? And where's the context within the novel, and for the reader? Unfortunately, there isn't much connective tissue between extended riffs such as these, and the character inhabiting the work. At its best, passages such as these can be interesting, and give the reader a crash course in genetics, musical history, language, computers – but at their worst they turn into a mash of gibberish, whole sentences and even paragraphs that literally do not make sense.

Each time Powers attempts humour, grace, charm, sex and desire, charisma or, bluntly, some form of emotion, he fails miserably, as though he were an adolescent trapped within the contours of his own skull, unable to properly empathise or understand the troubles and triumphs of other people. He shows an astonishing lack of most anything that could be called human, not because he fails to show the failures of life and love, but because he inserts these horrible, mangled, grotesque attempts that implode so spectacularly. He is an outsider looking in, attempting to give a detailed description of the beauty of a flower through heavily frosted glass, and standing a kilometre away in the snow. It simply can't be done, for whatever reason, but oh, how the man tries. Here, for the edification of the reader of this review, is a lengthy extract from a scene involving – well, figure it out for yourself:

“Each races the other to unilateral surrender. Something more than sex: an excavation, mohole, metric and insufficient, each time farther down, nearer a remembered core. By turns, his whole body is a coition-charged conductance and something else – the effortless, mate-free budding of plants. There is no Herbert; whatever pain they cause the man is erased by his wife's abandon. Ressler's forward motion into her becomes a rocking apology: clandestine. Never again. He has her, as he needed from word go.

He owes no one anything but compassion. His lone accountability is solely to the code. This woman was long ago inscribed in his genotype. She is his working out, his text made flesh, made enzyme. He will join himself to her, however pointless that deposit. He cannot do otherwise. She is underneath, around him: he feels her organic list. Her voiced breath dissolves into syllables, self-defense shouts, bird's cooing. He pins her, presses a spot in her back that touches off further thrashing.”

And on it goes. Yes, the two characters are having sex. But what sort of sex is this? How can these sentences adequately explain intercourse? They don't, and they aren't really trying. Instead, Powers shoves as much of his research-laden metaphors and similes into the mix, and occasionally remembers to indicate flesh-on-flesh contact. This is horrible writing, truly terrible, the cerebral turned rotten, intellectualism run rampant and allowed to swallow the human of who we are.

In the end, what we have is a man in thrall to his research. What he lacks in emotional maturity, he attempts to make up in endless outpourings of a game some authors like to play, called see-how-many-books-I-have-read. Richard Powers' more recent novels have altered the composition of research to heart somewhat, with the balancing tipping more in favour of the heart and thus, he is writing betters books, but by and large the problems that were evident at the start of his career remain present throughout the middle. He is a man with a lot to say about technology, but nothing to say about people – that is, those who use the technology, those who are affected by the science he so clearly loves. He is a man forever inventing complicated gadgets he just can't quite persuade anyone to use.

It is indicative of the novel's lack of power and insight that I had to do some extra research (that word again) to locate the character's names. There is such an accumulation of information within the six-hundred odd pages of The Gold Bug Variations that, when something important comes along (a name, an emotion, something resembling human interaction, even a plot point!), it quickly falls into the quicksand of gibberish that makes up the vast majority of this work. Reviews for the novel when it first came out in the early nineties have been, by and large, positive, though one wonders if that is simply because the staggering amount of stuff shoved between the covers is intimidating and, realistically, out of the grasp of most people anyway. It is a sad truth that four hundred or more pages of research could be removed without noticeably affecting the plot, but even that, while seeming a positive, would simply draw greater attention to the novel's flaws, which is everything else.

Author	Richard Powers
Title	The Gold Bug Variations
Nationality	American
Publisher	HarperCollins
Published	1993 (English)
Pages	640
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK)

See Also

Other works by Richard Powers under review:
---The Echo Maker
---The Time of Our Singing
List of American authors under review

Reviews

Handful of Sand
Lindsey Writes and Reads

Links

Richard Powers (Author website)