Powers, Richard 1957–

(Richard S. Powers)

PERSONAL: Born June 18, 1957, in Evanston, IL; father a school principal; married Jane Kuntz (a professor of French), 2001. Education: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, B.S., 1979, M.A., 1979. Hobbies and other interests: Music.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Illinois, 608 South Wright, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail—rpowers@uiuc.edu.

CAREER: Writer and educator. Worked as a computer programmer and data processor, in Boston, MA, beginning 1980; University of Illinois, Urbana, professor of creative writing, 1992–96, Swanlund Chair in English, 1996–.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected fellow, 1998).

AWARDS, HONORS: Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award for best American fiction, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, special citation from PEN/Hemingway Foundation, and nomination for best novel award, National Book Critics Circle, all 1986, all for Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance; MacArthur Foundation grant, 1989; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for fiction, 1992, for The Gold Bug Variations; National Book Award nomination for fiction, 1993, for Operation Wandering Soul; Lannon Literary Award, 1999; Vursell Prize, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and New York Times notable book designation, both 2000, both for Plowing the Dark; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, New York Times notable book designation, and London Evening Standard best books of the year designation, all 2003, and W.H. Smith Literary Award, and Ambassador Book Award, both 2004, all for The Time of Our Singing; Corrington Award for Literary Excellence; Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Beech Tree Books (New York, NY), 1985.

Prisoner's Dilemma, Beech Tree Books (New York, NY), 1988.

The Gold Bug Variations, Morrow (New York, NY), 1991.

Operation Wandering Soul, Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

Galatea 2.2, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1995.

Gain, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1998.

Plowing the Dark, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2000.

The Time of Our Singing, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, New Yorker, and Yale Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel about brain injury and memory loss.

SIDELIGHTS: American author Richard Powers is the acclaimed writer of a series of ambitious, intellectual, and highly praised novels that include Prisoner's Dilemma, Gain, and The Time of Our Singing. Within these works, noted Joseph Dewey in his Understanding Richard Powers, the author creates protagonists who, when confronted with challenging, tantalizing, or even threatening circumstances, "shift between the impulse to connect and its inevitable crash and burn; between the Emersonian urge to embrace the difficult ad-lib of the world and the Dickinsonesque need to recoil from its evident bruising into the supple sanctuary of the aesthetic enterprise, to withdraw into the secure refuge of a novel, a piece of music, a movie house, a museum, even cyberspace." Writing in Contemporary Novelists, Tom LeClair also summarized Powers's work, noting that his novels deal with "historical subjects, including 20th-century wars, and his scientific orientations, including cybernetics and biology"; that they show Powers's "interests in neurology and cognition, media such as photography and film, and the disasters of contemporary American life"; and that they use "autobiography to examine the sources and values of fictions." "What distinguishes Powers's work," contended Le-Clair, "is his imaginative earnestness, this prodigy's premodern urge to impart his knowledge to readers."

Particularly during his early career Powers gained a reputation as somewhat of a recluse due to his avoidance of the press. One of five children born to an Illinois high-school principal, Powers left the stable, suburban midwestern United States to live first in a Chicago suburb, and then, from ages ten through fifteen, in Thailand, where his father found a job with the International School of Bangkok despite the political unrest then affecting Southeast Asia. Perhaps because of this relocation, as a child Powers immersed himself in musical instruments such as the cello, clarinet, and saxophone, as well as in reading nonfiction. An interest in science prompted him to declare physics as his major when he enrolled at the University of Illinois, but a new interest in European modernist literature surfaced during his science studies, prompting Powers to also earn his M.A. in English in 1979. After college he moved to Boston and worked in the computer programming field, all the while continuing his wide reading and immersing himself in the world of the arts, science, history, and ideas.

Powers began his literary career in the mid-1980s with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, in which a nameless narrator becomes obsessed with uncovering information about August Sander's 1914 photograph of three well-dressed men strolling outside Cologne, Germany. The same photograph—which captivated Pow-ers's own interest when he saw it on display in a Boston museum he frequented—is later uncovered by a magazine editor who is, in turn, searching for a woman he saw only briefly at an Armistice Day parade. As the narrator's hunt brings him to a greater understanding of the horrific World War I era, so too does it cause him to cross paths with the questing editor. These respective searches prompt a greater sense of the interconnected-ness of all things. George Kearns, writing in the Hudson Review, described Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance as "ambitious and dazzling" and deemed the work "a splendid fiction." In addition, Kearns praised Powers as "a learned writer."

Powers's next published work, Prisoner's Dilemma, focuses on a peculiar family whose members come to terms with death and, perhaps more importantly, with themselves. The family is dominated by the father, a retired history teacher who seems to have conducted child-rearing as an extended examination. Now fully grown, his four offspring alternately fear and revere their father, and they each find themselves in difficult emotional circumstances when the possibility arises that the patriarch is gravely ill. Each of the characters in Powers's novel contributes narration, and the father provides commentary of a different sort by recording fictive tales of life in an imaginary American town. One of the offspring secretly studies the recordings and thus manages to gain a greater understanding of his quirky parent.

Upon publication in 1988, Prisoner's Dilemma confirmed Powers's reputation as a daring, insightful writer. Frederick Busch, in a Chicago Tribune Books appraisal, hailed Prisoner's Dilemma as "a long, intelligent look at large and small issues" and called it a "fine novel." Maureen Howard proclaimed in Nation that Prisoner's Dilemma is "magnificent" and "grand fiction," while Tom LeClair affirmed in a New Republic review that Powers surpasses his earlier work by producing "a better novel, more mature and assured." LeClair concluded by classifying the writer as "a major American novelist."

Written during an extended stay in the Netherlands, The Gold Bug Variations, Powers's third novel, embraces romance, science, and computer technology. The novel's central figure is Stuart Ressler, a biologist involved in DNA research. The narrative shifts back and forth between the 1950s, during which time Ressler is pursuing his scientific endeavors, and the 1980s, when he holds a low-level position at a database operation. In the 1980s narrative, two of Ressler's coworkers deter-mine to uncover why he ceased scientific work. Although the two coworkers eventually become romantically involved, their romantic relationship is quickly threatened by another inquiry. With The Gold Bug Variations, Powers won further recognition as a versatile and demanding storyteller. Louis B. Jones, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described the novel as "a dense, symmetrical symphony in which no note goes unsounded," and added: "Just seeing so much sheer cleverness packed into 639 pages is a remarkable experience." Time contributor Paul Gray, noting that some readers might find the novel's title—a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's seminal mystery as well as J.S. Bach's great keyboard work—"a little too cute," added that "the rest are in for a read of dazzling, sometimes intimidating complexity." The Gold Bug Variations, Gray concluded, is a "masterly novel."

Gain presents the long history of Clare Corporation, a fictitious soap manufacturer that resembles Proctor & Gamble, and the life of Laura, a woman who eventually loses her struggle with ovarian cancer. Laura and one of Clare's factories both reside in the same midwestern city. In Gain, "Powers lays out parallel narrative lines—one telling the history of American business, the other examining the life of a contemporary homemaker," commented Tom LeClair, going on to note in his Nation review: "On a second reading one finds some ingenious connections and subtle analogues between the stories, but the novel essentially relies on old-fashioned suspense." In contrast, Mark Shecner declared in a review for the New Leader that "Powers's history of soap [is not] always gripping; it is too much the fever chart in prose—boom, bust, next boom, next bust—populated by characters who only occasionally step out of their textbook personae long enough to become believable." Claiming that "character development is not the strong suit of Gain," Shecner asserted: "The book is, rather, a succession of vivid moments, and Powers is never better than in his sharp exposures of the discrepancy between the cruelty of the young nation and its piety."

Although Booklist reviewer Joann Wilkinson called Gain both "incredibly moving and incredibly dull," she praised the story for presenting "an ordinary woman's heroic struggle" in "a powerful and poignant" manner. As LeClair described in his Nation review, Powers's "close focus on a year of her life is what soap opera used to be—women's daily tragedy…. A plucky divorcee with a sulky daughter and virtual-reality son, a spineless lover and bumbling ex-husband, Laura thinks of her house and garden as a 'safe haven' from human conditions and disease." Shecner contended in his New Leader review that readers are not compelled to truly know Powers's protagonist; "as she dies of cancer, Laura does not quite exist for us except as the sum of her sufferings, her treatments, her incomprehension of everything that is going on." Shecner, considering Pow-ers's immense literary abilities, expressed surprise that in Gain "the corporation, for all its corruption and obtuseness, shines more brightly than the people it destroys." But in his Nation review, LeClair noted that he "found the richness of information in Gain both emotionally and intellectually compelling." Describing the novel as a "somber book, not to everyone's taste," Library Journal contributor Mark Kloszewski added that, as is characteristic of Powers's work in general, Gain "has something important to say."

Describing Powers's first six novels—which include Gain and The Gold Bug Variations as well as the science-fiction work Galatea 2.2—as "persuasively angry at the conditions of twentieth-century life and remarkably sympathetic to its victims," LeClair maintained that the novelist's chief purpose is "to save lives…. His means have been ingeniously formed stories—novel as meditation on a photograph, as taped fantasy and chromosomal dance, as literary collage and connectionist brainscape." In the New Leader, Shecner observed: "The new thing these days is Infofiction, writing that is part storytelling and part textbook, or sometimes one part storytelling and two parts textbook…. The novelist is now a researcher … and none is more devoted to the info side of Infofiction than Richard Powers."

In Plowing the Dark, Powers again produces a highly researched novel in which several story strands intersect around their examination of the purpose and effect of representational art. "Despite the second commandment (and a similar prohibition in the Koran), creative people have been trying to simulate the visible world ever since the dawn of mankind," explained Washington Post Book World contributor Steven Moore. Every painting, sketch, movie, diorama, play, or other visual entertainment has as its goal to mimic and often to improve on humanity, and each emanates from the human imagination. With this theological conflict in mind, Powers draws his readers to Seattle, Washington, where a research company called TetraSys is attempting to perfect virtual reality technology by re-creating some of art's great works and making them accessible in three dimensions. In Powers's story, one can not only view a painting, one can now enter it; according to an Atlantic Monthly writer, "Virtual reality … is not just the next step in technology; it is the ultimate goal of all technology, of all symbolic thought since the cave painting." Powers's main protagonist, disillusioned artist Adie Klarpol, is hired by the company to help transform the room in which the computer-generated imagery is generated into a replica of the Hagia Sophia. In the process she is won over to the potential of the new technology for transcending and freeing creative humans from an art bound by what actually exists in nature. Ultimately, however, the more sinister motives of TetraSys emerge, causing Klarpol to reconsider her beliefs.

From the U.S. West Coast, Powers shifts his story to Beirut, Lebanon, where a young Iranian-American university ESL teacher named Taimur Martin is held captive—malnourished and chained, blindfolded, to a bed in an isolated cell—by a group of hard-line Islamic fundamentalists. Isolated for over four years, the teacher has mentally abandoned his tortured reality, in effect using his imagination to create a separate "virtual" reality composed of songs, memories, stories, and contemplation as a means of coping. As an Atlantic Monthly reviewer noted, what Martin endures in physical torture and discomfort, Klarpol "undergoes emotionally: abandonment, imprisonment, isolation, the struggle to sustain the imagination."

Dubbing Powers "one of our brainier novelists," the Atlantic Monthly contributor placed the author at the forefront of the aforementioned Infofiction—or what he called "encyclopedic postmodernism"—writing that, while some discursive literary types get the technology wrong, for Powers "mathematics and physics are not just gaudy abstractions …, they are concrete experiences." However, the critic continued, such a wealth of technical detail threatens to smother the "delicate and vigorous" novel genre; Powers's "characters seem to interest him only as vehicles for meditating on Big Ideas and Great Events," while plot and dramatic tension wither. As Michiko Kakutani noted in a New York Times review, Plowing the Dark becomes "a static if often provocative book that reads like a series of essays with a couple of glittering set pieces tossed in to grab the reader's attention."

As Valerie Sayers noted in her Commonweal review of Plowing the Dark, the character of Klarpol serves Powers's purpose primarily in the artist's capacity as a "technological illiterate"; her character "functions as the outsider and innocent learning the political and moral implications of a technology that is capable of representing reality in (nearly) all its dimensions." In contrast, Martin's story is far from abstract; "a reader who abides with Martin in his solitary cell will emerge spent and shaken," Sayers asserted, impressed by the "emotional realities" of the prisoner's story. Klarpol and her coworkers in the Cavern "lose touch with the outside world, with their lives, with the motives of the corporation that hired them," explained Los Angeles Times reviewer Michael Harris. "Imagination seduces them, even as it proves to be Taimur's salvation in captivity." These two story lines are threaded independently through the book until the end, when, according to Moore, Powers "pulls off one of the most astonishing feats" in literature by causing these two stories to "dovetail in … a daring, unpredictable and emotionally powerful way."

In The Time of Our Singing, Powers deals with modern American culture and issues surrounding race, particularly as it both divides and brings people together. The central tension of the novel is embodied in its first few pages, as internationally acclaimed African American opera singer Marian Anderson sings on the Mall in Washington, DC, in April of 1939, having been prevented by members of the Daughters of the American Revolution from performing at Constitution Hall. At this concert, a black music student named Delia meets David Strom, a German-Jewish physicist, and the two fall in love. Soon married, they attempt to live without regard to their biracial reality, and raise three children who are each talented musically: Jonah, Joseph—the novel's narrator—and Ruth. As the children grow up and address both their gifts and their cultural and racial heritage, they follow divergent paths through the social turmoil of the second half of the twentieth century; as Emma Brockes noted in the Manchester Guardian, the novel centers on music as a social metaphor that encompasses race and class differences. Powers "builds page-long riffs around the performances of Jonah …, answering coldness with something that comes closer, at times, to schmaltz. If there is occasionally too much soaring and whooping and lifting of hearts, the metaphor gets nicely at the workings of social hierarchy, how arbitrary and changing it is, a system into race as a single variable is fed." Praising the novel as "an ambitious and wholly believable modern tragedy" that serves as "the crowing glory of an already impressive and underrated body of work," Spectator contributor G.E. Armitage added that The Time of Our Singing stands as "proof that there are still some writers for whom the telling of necessary, intelligent and engaging tales still matters."

At 631 pages long, The Time of Our Singing nonetheless drew readers, as well as critical praise. Noting that "it is hard to think of another novel since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus that uses music so effectively and with such authority," Chicago Tribune Books con-tributor Steven G. Kellman added that by positioning his characters within a milieu in which they encounter race-based city riots, Powers "has not made a joyful noise. Out of the troubled zeitgeist" of the second half of the twentieth century, the novelist "has fashioned a major cantata in a minor key." In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, James Dewey praised The Time of Our Singing as "a deeply affective meditation on time, racial identity, and the complex engine of memory, big ideas that are here offered within a narrative of heartbreaking poignancy in which … characters confront … the landmark moments of midcentury history."

Despite his growing literary reputation, Powers continues to keep a low profile, maintaining that public interest in the artist ultimately slights and is irrelevant to the art itself. "That's what always seems to happen in this culture," he related to John F. Baker in a Publishers Weekly profile, "you grab hold of a personality and ignore the work." Still, Powers has admitted that the absurdity of American culture—which he described as "an amazing mess"—also serves as a source of inspiration for his writing. "One of the great things about American fiction today is its outrageousness …," he told Baker. "You've only got to read certain writers to realize the country is wonderfully mad."

On a more serious note, as Powers told Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune, "The purpose of art is to remind us that there are an infinite number of options that we haven't even considered yet." With each new book, Powers also reminds readers that options exist with regard to the author's area of focus as well as to his choice of style and genre. "When you reserve the right to reinvent yourself with each new book," he told Keller, "the downside is that the readership attracted to your previous book is going to be baffled. They're not necessarily going to want to travel with you." While acknowledging that such a shifting focus may limit his chance to ever rank as a best-selling novelist, with each book Powers seeks out and exposes new interconnections in the world around him, playing out what New Yorker contributor Sven Birkerts called his "intense private struggle … for equilibrium."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 93, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dewey, Joseph, Understanding Richard Powers, University of South Carolina Press, 2002.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, July, 2000, review of Plowing the Dark, pp. 95-97; January-February, 2003, review of The Time of Our Singing, pp. 190-193.

Booklist, June 1, 1998, Joann Wilkinson, p. 1726.

Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1995, Ron Fletcher, review of Galatea 2.2, p. 13.

Commonweal, September 8, 2000, Valerie Sayers, review of Plowing the Dark, p. 35.

Critique, fall, 1996, Tom LeClair, "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wallace."

Guardian (Manchester, England), March 14, 2003, Emma Brockes, "Magic Powers" (interview), p. 2.

Hudson Review, spring, 1986, George Kearns, review of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, pp. 133-134.

Library Journal, May 1, 1998, Mark Kloszewski, review of Gain, p. 140.

Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2000, Michael Harris, review of Plowing the Dark, section E, p. 3.

Nation, May 14, 1988, Maureen Howard, review of Prisoner's Dilemma, pp. 680-684; July 27, 1998, Tom LeClair, review of Gain, p. 33.

New Leader, June 29, 1998, Marc Shecner, review of Gain, p. 26.

New Republic, April 25, 1988, Tom LeClair, review of Prisoner's Dilemma, pp. 40-42; May 14, 2001, Michael Ravitch, review of Plowing the Dark, p. 45.

New Yorker, January 13, 2003, Sven Birkets, review of The Time of Our Singing, p. 85.

New York Review of Books, January 11, 2001, John Leonard, "Mind Painting," pp. 42-48.

New York Times, June 27, 1995, Michiko Kakutani, review of Galatea 2.2, section C, p. 19; June 20, 2000, Kakutani, review of Plowing the Dark, section E, p. 8.

New York Times Book Review, September 1, 1985, Marco Portales, review of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, p. 14; September 10, 1989, review of Prisoner's Dilemma, p. 42; August 25, 1991, Louis B. Jones, review of The Gold Bug Variations, pp. 9-10; July 18, 1993, Meg Wolitzer, review of Operation Wandering Soul, p. 19; July 23, 1995, Robert Cohen, review of Galatea 2.2, p. 17.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 2000, Charles B. Harris, review of Plowing the Dark, p. 165; spring, 2003, Joseph Dewey, review of The Time of Our Singing, p. 133.

Spectator, March 8, 2003, G.E. Armitage, "The Sound of Music," p. 42.

Time, September 2, 1991, Paul Gray, review of The Gold Bug Variations, p. 68.

Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 1992, Roy Porter, review of The Gold Bug Variations, p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 28, 1988, Frederick Busch, review of Prisoner's Dilemma, p. 3; January 12, 2003, Steven G. Kellman, review of The Time of Our Singing, p. 1.

Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1993, Lee Lescaze, review of Operation Wandering Soul, section A, p. 14; July 5, 1995, Merle Rubin, review of Galatea 2.2, section A, p. 7.

Washington Post Book World, June 4, 2000, Steven Moore, review of Plowing the Dark, p. 6.

ONLINE

Richard Powers Web site, http://www.richardpowers.net/ (October 29, 2004).

Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (July, 1998), Laura Miller, interview with Powers.