The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

With the exception of Powers’ latest novel (which, admittedly, felt more like a novella, for him), or at least everything of his that I’ve read, invariably contains two parallel plots, one current and one historical, that converge around some central idea. The Gold Bug Variations is no different, and it may be easily be Powers’ most well-known work, and I daresay his most lengthy and daring.

To put it glibly, The Gold Bug Variations draws connecting lines between genetics, music (specifically Bach’s Goldberg Variations), and to some degree, computer science. While the book certainly has a long reach, its ultimate impact fails to be quite as impressive as it promises to be.

Three stories in one

The briefest of summation as can be applied: Stuart Ressler, a young molecular biologist, joins a team at the University of Illinois in the 1950s to crack the genetic code. His first year, he manages to fall in love with a married colleague, and comes upon the cusp of a major breakthrough by happenstance when he begins to listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and realizes the similarity between the music’s variation from four bass notes and DNA’s variation from four base chemical pairs. Fast forward to the mid-80s: Ressler is now working at a data processing facility in New York, where he plays the father figure to a young colleague named Todd, who works as a night operator even though his real passion is obscure Flemish painters. Todd meets and courts a librarian named Jan, who immediately falls in love with him (romantically) and with Ressler (not romantically). Jump ahead several more years: Ressler has recently died, Todd is apparently somewhere in the Low Countries, and Jan is falling apart at the seams as she attempts to figure out what went wrong with Todd, understand Ressler’s abandoned work in genetics, and cope with the loss of both of them.

In mechanical terms, I would not call Powers the greatest writer of our generation. Even in his other books which I prefer to Goldbug have rhetorical flair but relatively uncompelling characters. See William Deresiewicz’s article for The Nation:

[W]hat’s missing from the novel is, well, a novel. The characters are idealized, the love stories mawkish and clichéd, the emotions meant to ground the scientific speculations in lived experience announced rather than established. The thinnest of devices are introduced to allow Powers to suspend the plot for dozens of pages at a stretch while he lays out the genetic and musicological basics that will ultimately enable him to get to the interesting stuff.

[...]

He has been called an experimental novelist for some reason, but aside from a predilection for double plots, his approach to narrative is quite conventional, even naïve. Rather than Pynchon and DeLillo, the writer he most reminds me of is Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and much of what Powers does is closer to science writing than to fiction.

There’s an important point to be had here: Powers’ characters don’t usually act, or speak, or even think as we expect real people to, but instead do whatever he feels is necessarily to illustrate his next large-scale point about whichever topic he’s covering; thus, every character sounds like Richard Powers, even when narrated in the first person (as Jan is). I think Deresiewicz’s point stands: Powers seems to be a wonderful science writer who, for reasons unbeknown to us, insists upon writing fiction.

That’s not entirely fair: Powers isn’t a bad fiction writer, but when he’s particularly excited about whatever “macro” idea he’s integrating, he tends to forget himself, as was the case with The Gold Bug Variations. Paradoxically, though his characters were thin and weak, his writing was as rhetorically-exciting as I’ve ever seen it, which may account for some of the novels girth; it seemed at times he gets so wrapped up in adjectives and similes to describe the new morning that he forgets his character needs to get out of bed.

Encryption and Variation

The book’s name, and in some ways its content, is an elaborate pun about the aforementioned Goldberg Variations by Bach and The Gold Bug by Edgar Allen Poe, the first book to popularize the notion of simple encryption and substitution ciphers. Powers has muddled the three all up until the reader is almost convinced that it’s there’s an elaborate connection between the three in nature; that music, the building blocks of life, and mathematical theory are all vines intertwined around the same academic tree. But they aren’t; at least, not in the fulfilling sense that we’d like it to be, hoping against our better sense for Dr. Ressler’s sudden appreciation of the Goldberg variations to spark some revolution in the field. At best, you could say that these things are metaphors for each other, and that they have a vivid and romantic similarity.

This knowledge is why, when Powers has finally climaxed, one feels distinctly underwhelmed; in the words of Peggy Lee: “Is That All There Is?” It’s all very clever, but it doesn’t invoke the melancholy or somber gravity of Three Farmers, and our relative distance from the characters has preempted much personal involvement. There isn’t a nice ending to be had, anyway; in retrospect, The Gold Bug Variations was as much about failure and disappointment and mistakes as it was ever about the grand relationship between nature, art, and math. The characters are irreparable misfits with unlovable flaws who remain largely unloved and unsuccessful and unimpressive. I can’t give details without spoiling the second half the book, but needless to say, Powers’ usually static characters were positively immobile this time around—once again, perhaps because Powers was too busy waxing eloquent about his hobby horses to dedicate much time to writing characters or plot.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Like a lot of readers, my impression of Nick Hornby is most influenced by High Fidelity, which is still widely considered his best novel. I can’t say for certain, but I suspect that the book’s popularity has not a little to do with its treatment of minutiae: the plot itself is somewhat tepid romantic comedy fare, but the tangents about pop records are delivered with such a characteristic force that one can’t help but pay attention.

Juliet, Naked attempts to recapture some of that juju. It’s the story of Tucker Crowe, a somewhat obscure indie musician from the 70s and 80s who very suddenly left the music scene (and any sort of public persona) after a mysterious incident in the bathroom of a Minnesota nightclub. For the next twenty years, a gaggle of his most devoted fans have speculated about his life, the cause of his exit, the merits of his music, and theories about his current whereabouts. To readers somewhat familiar with the indie rock scene, that kind of underground obsession is a familiar phenomenon—the tendency of the fanatical is to impose genius upon the mysterious. Hornby’s status as a cognoscente of the pop music scene gives the story a certain sense of slick verisimilitude that works well.

I said that Juliet, Naked is the story of Tucker Crowe, but it’s as much the story of Annie and Duncan, two middle-aged Brits in a loveless relationship in a small seaside town outside of London filled mostly with geriatrics. Duncan is one of those obsessive fans that I alluded to earlier; his 20-year obsession with Crowe, both pre- and especially post-disappearance is a source of eye-rolling dismissal from Annie, who is mostly with Duncan out of sheer laziness or inertia. She wants a child; Duncan doesn’t, and at 45, Annie is feeling her latitude slipping away.

Things begin to fall apart (or come together….. [said with a rising inflection]) when Duncan receives in the mail a new album called Juliet, Naked, a collection of rough acoustic demos of the songs from Crowe’s final album, Juliet. While Annie is underwhelmed by the new album (she is, while not a Tucker Crowe enthusiast, could be considered a Tucker Crowe fan), Duncan finds it brilliant, and their differing opinions (not to mention Duncan’s subtely dismissive rejection of hers) shine a light on the hairline cracks in their relationship. When Annie—heretofore largely unengaged in writing—writes a review and posts it to the Tucker Crowe website which Duncan frequents, it elicits a clandestine email from none other than Tucker Crowe himself.

I have to admit that I find the character drama of Juliet, Naked a little less engaging than that of High Fidelity, but that’s perhaps because I have more in common with a relatively young music store owner than I do with a 45-year-old doofus from Britain But while the two books are compared, and quite rightly, their narrative characters are actually substantially different: they are both, at heart, about a couple or couples struggling to find themselves, but while his earlier novel’s characters were indefatigably hip despite themselves, the characters of Juliet, Naked are all irreparably broken, sagging creatures, fighting against the physical and psychological ravages of age and their own, considerably less hip, dysfunction.

Like most romances of this sort, the relationships which eventually form or disband are predictable, though this has never stopped such stories from being popular or interesting. The meaning and impact tends to filter through preconceptions of the readers; as High Fidelity was to vinyl lovers and post-collegiate sad sacks in the throes of existential crises, so Juliet, Naked is to depressive middle-agers and pathetic indie scene kids and obstinate men clinging to their youthful obsessions. You could call the ending “happy” if you don’t mind vilifying (perhaps unnecessarily) a number of its characters, and you don’t mind seeing it coming from quarter of the way into the book. Hornby’s writing so heavily telegraphs itself that it obviates the actual reading of the book; the narrative progression is a function of nothing more than time–it seems as though it will labor to its conclusion regardless of our emotional investment or the growth of its characters or events of any particular interest. I begin to wonder if the book requires no more to read than it apparently took Hornby to write it. I see what he was trying to do, but I can’t escape the suspicious that he phoned this one in.

1. Missy Higgins – [On A Clear Night #09] Peachy
2. Mogwai – [Come on Die Young #02] Cody
3. Opeth – [My Arms, Your Hearse #02] April Ethereal
4. Joaquin Rodrigo – [Concierto de Aranjuez (Romero) #10] Invocation et danse: 2. Allegro moderato: Polo
5. Nightingale – [I #02] Still In The Dark
6. Foo Fighters – [There Is Nothing Left To Lose #09] Headwires
7. Swarm Of The Lotus – [When White Becomes Black #09] Episode Infinity
8. Jason Falkner – [Presents Author Unknown #05] She Goes To Bed
9. Michael Jackson – [Bad #04] Liberian Girl
10. Gustav Mahler – [The Complete Symphonies CD9 #01] Symphony No.7 in E Minor – 1a. Langsam (Adagio)

1. Nine Inch Nails – [The Downward Spiral #04] March of the Pigs
2. Nine Inch Nails – [With Teeth [5.1] #12] Beside You In Time
3. Virgos Merlot – [Signs of a Vacant Soul #12] Disregarding
4. Beirut – [The Flying Club Cup #02] Nantes
5. Sergio – [Swords #02] The Spendthrift
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – [Nocturama #03] Right Out Of Your Hand
7. John Vanderslice – [Pixel Revolt #09] Dear Sarah Shu
8. Mogwai – [Happy Songs for Happy People #02] Moses? I Amn’t
9. Mew – [And The Glass Handed Kites #05] Apocalypso
10. Grails – [Doomsdayer's Holiday #01] Doomsdayer’s Holiday

1. Zao – [Legendary #04] Suspend Suspension
2. Pain of Salvation – [Entropia #12] Plains Of Dawn
3. Cave In – [Perfect Pitch Black #09] Tension In The Ranks
4. Paul Hindemith – [The 3 Piano Sonatas #03] Sonata No.1 III.Lebhaft
5. Ben Folds – [Ben Folds Live #11] Army
6. Leaves – [The Angela Test #04] As We Walk
7. Feist – [Let It Die #09] Secret Heart
8. Five Pointe O – [Untitled #05] Freedom?
9. Nine Inch Nails – [The Fragile CD1 #11] La Mer
10. Enslaved – [Below The Lights #04] Queen Of Night

1. The Dillinger Escape Plan – [Ire Works #13] Mouth Of Ghosts
2. Sentenced – [Frozen #03] Dead Leaves
3. Nick Drake – [Five Leaves Left #06] Cello Song
4. Giants – [Demo #02] Berlin Rooftop
5. Tenhi – [Kauan #02] Huomen
6. Sergei Rachmaninov (Vladimir Ashkenazy; André Previn, London Symphony Orchestra) – [Complete Piano Concertos, Rhapsody CD1 #05] Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, Op.18: 2. Adagio sostenuto
7. Conor Oberst – [Conor Oberst #01] Cape Canaveral
8. The Tea Party – [TRIPtych #12] Gone
9. Metallica – [S&M CD2 #08] One
10. The Decemberists – [The Tain #01] The Tain

1. Sondre Lerche – [Don't Be Shallow #03] I Know I Know
2. Paco de Lucía – [Antología CD1 #01] Almoraima
3. Fiona Apple – [Extraordinary Machine (Brion version, unmastered) #05] Oh Well
4. Paragon of Beauty – [Comfort Me, Infinity #01] This Impossible Moment
5. Cave In – [Jupiter #06] Requiem
6. Ben Folds – [Songs for Goldfish #05] Weather Channel Music
7. Mogwai – [Rock Action #01] Sine Wave
8. Sigur Rós – [( ) #02] Fyrsta
9. Fastball – [All the Pain Money Can Buy #08] G.O.D. (Good Old Days)
10. Darkane – [Rusted Angel #06] A Wisdoms Breed

1. Nine Inch Nails – [With Teeth #12] Beside You In Time
2. Stars – [Heart #11] Don’t Be Afraid To Sing
3. Beirut – [Elephant Gun #02] Transatlantique
4. Nine Inch Nails – [The Slip #08] Corona Radiata
5. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – [Ella & Louis Sing Gershwin #15] I Was Doing All Right
6. Evereve – [Stormbirds #14] Valse Bizarre
7. Anekdoten – [From Within] Kiss of Life
8. Jason Mraz – [We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things #06] Love for a Child
9. Magyar Posse – [Random Avenger #01] Whirlpool Of Terror And Tension
10. My Dying Bride – [The Dreadful Hours #08] The Return to the Beautiful

1. Ved Buens Ende – [Those Who Caress The Pale #05] Those who Caress the Pale
2. Opeth – [My Arms, Your Hearse #02] April Ethereal
3. Mum – [Go go smear the poison ivy #11] Guilty Rocks
4. In Flames – [The Jester Race / Black Ash Inheritance #03] Artifacts of the Black Rain
5. Doves – [Lost Souls #01] Firesuite
6. Neurosis – [A Sun That Never Sets #07] Crawl Back In
7. VAST – [April #04] Sunday I’ll Be Gone
8. Samuel Barber – [Orchestral Works, Volume 4 #03] [Concerto for Piano and Orchestra] – III. Allegro molto
9. Jason Mraz – [Mr. A-Z #11] The Forecast
10. No-Man – [Flowermouth #02] You grow more beautiful

1. October Tide – [Rain Without End #03] All Painted Cold
2. Samuel Barber – [Orchestral Works, Volume 3 #06] [op. 28] – III. Pas de Deux (A Corner of the Ballroom)
3. Low – [The Great Destroyer #03] Everybody’s Song
4. Neurosis – [Given to the Rising #02] Fear and Sickness
5. Elend – [A World in Their Screams #01] Ophis Puthôn
6. Solefald – [Red For Fire: An Icelandic Odyssey Part 1 #02] Survival of the Outlaw
7. Agalloch – [Ashes Against the Grain #03] This White Mountain on Which You Will Die
8. Regina Spektor – [11:11 #07] wasteside
9. Sigur Rós – [Ágætis Byrjun #05] Ný Batterí­
10. Sufjan Stevens – [Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State #06] Tahquamenon Falls