Generosity: An Enhancement
by Richard Powers

Previously, I’ve reviewed Powers’ novels Galatea 2.2 and Three Farmers On Their Way to a Day. In those reviews, I made some observations general to Powers himself as a writer, and not simply to the individual books themselves. Notably, Powers tends to write rather two-dimensional characters doing two-dimensional things—mere cogs in his much larger and more elaborate narrative machinery. Second, Powers has never written (to my knowledge) a book where the nature of the narrator is clear; rather, it’s some unknown conglomeration of real Powers, fake Powers, and wholecloth invention. Finally, so much of Powers’ writing tends to focus on the conflict between technological progress, reflecting humanity’s ability to improve despite itself, and emotional or artistic progress, reflecting humanity’s ability to succeed despite itself.

Generosity is his latest of 9 such novels, and not much has changed.

That shouldn’t come off like an insult, even if it sounds like it. Part of Powers’ brilliance, I think, is his ability to write novels that aren’t really about characters at all—a topic which he approaches, however obliquely, in this very book. It begins with an anti-hero, Russell Stone, who is a washed-up writer with neuroses teaching a writing course at a Chicago community college. Though he’s not a great teacher, the class ends up revolving around the magnetic personality of one Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian refugee who by all rights should be an emotional wreck, but who instead pulsates with a constant exuberance for life that infects those around her. Eventually, Thassa’s condition (which she does not see as a condition) comes to the attention of Thomas Kurton, a scientist working to find (and patent!) the gene for happiness, and eventually the national media. In the meantime, Stone cultivates a romantic relationship with Candance Weld, one of the community college’s resident psychiatrist/counselors.

Gape at the Dramatis Personae: the Stone, the chickenshit “protagonist” who will stay chickenshit through; Thassa, the relentlessly happy young woman whose patience will be tested by the media circus; Weld, the damaged single mother ironically playing the role of a helpless therapist; Thomas Kurton, the caricatured reductive scientist intent upon describing even the most basic of human conditions as patterns of amino acids. Add to that Tonia Schiff, the career newswoman suddenly balking at her shallow career, and you’ve got a list of characters plucked straight from their molds. As I said, you can’t read Powers looking for a good character drama.

Three Farmers On Their Way to a Day dealt with war; Galatea 2.2 dealt with technology; Generosity deals with bio-ethics, and it does it with the sort of poetry and complexity we’ve all come to expect from a Richard Powers novel. In both of the former novels, Powers constructed parallel threads occurring at two points in history, meant to inform one another and tease similarities between two superficially disparate but fundamentally similar scenarios. In this new novel, the parallels are more post-modern than that. A running theme which stems from Russell’s Stone’s history as a writer is the difference between “creative nonfiction” and fiction; more simply, the difference between life as we observe it and live as we like to portray it. At one point, Thassa reveals that her short story of an old woman climbing a set of stairs was fabricated in the sense that it didn’t happen as it was written, but was rather an idealized combination of multiple experiences, and this greatly upsets Stone, a consummate lover of nonfiction. It is easy—remedial, even—for the reader to draw parallels between the writer’s division between depicting the world as it is and depicting it as it should be and the bioethicist’s division between declaring that nature is right (even if it include birth defects and depression and generalized sadness) and what science gives us the potential to enact.

In fact, the question of this narrator’s identity is more maddening than in any other book of Powers’ that I’ve read: even after finishing, I cannot decide whom it is supposed to represent, and what the curveball of the last couple of pages is supposed to indicate. Perhaps the author left it ambiguous; or perhaps I’m simply two indecisive about the whole thing, and the narrator of Generosity is no different than previous narrators—that is, a modified version of the author himself—and Powers is simply showing off his literary legerdemain: “See, this is me, writing a novel about writing a novel”, and the line between what is invention and what is description is just blurred enough that you’re never sure which is which.

In researching the novel, I came across Peter Kramer’s review for Slate, in which the review seems to think that Powers, rather than attempting to highlight the conflict between two opposing modes, is merely acting as a cheerleader for the fiction-slash-genetic-modification angle, and “never elaborates the counterargument”. I happen to think this is a totally bogus notion, which is not only borne out by the text, but foretold by his similar approach to every other novel he’s ever written. To me, Powers ranks in the upper echelon with Kurt Vonnegut as one of the most important writers warning about the potential conflict between our technology and our humanity. Generosity, in its own way, continues that tradition in another upcoming field (read: bioethics), and with the same narrative and poetic skill that we’ve all come to expect from Powers.

The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall

This is not the first time I’ve read The Raw Shark Texts; in fact, it was only a conspicuously-short time ago that I read it for the first time. Having recommended it to a number of people, I revisited my review of it and was perturbed to find it less than stellar—more confused than anything.

The truth is, The Raw Shark Texts is one of my favorite new books of the last few years. It’s interesting and experimental and daring in a way I don’t see very often.

It starts out normally enough: our main character awakes in a strange house to find that he has no memory of anything. He finds a letter, apparently written by himself to himself, instructing him to visit a psychiatrist named Dr. Randle, who gives him an appropriately medical diagnosis: Eric is an old patient of hers who suffers from a recurring dissociative disorder known as a “fugue.” It all stems, he’s told, from the accidental death of his girlfriend, Clio Aames, while the two were vacationing in Greece.

Here’s the thing you need to understand about The Raw Shark Texts: it thrives in its mysteriousness and ambiguity. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Eric Sanderson the Second has either stumbled upon a whole new world (or a whole new way or looking at the current one) or is completely batshit insane, as his psychiatrist may attest.

For Eric Sanderson is hunted by a large Ludovician—a “conceptual shark,” one of many species of conceptual creature that have evolved to live within the ever-present current of concepts, ideas, and communication that invisibly inhabit everything we do. Eric Sanderson explains it the best in a fragment of text his leaves to his predecessor, wherein he asks the reader to imagine something, and one the reader has an imagine of that thing in his head, questions how it got from the writer’s mind to the reader’s—that is to say, there’s a something, some medium in which that idea lives between minds. This is the conceptual sea in which the Ludovician lives, and it’s the idea of ideas that Hall will manipulate throughout the rest of the book.

If I’m sparing with plot details, it’s because it benefits you, the prospective reader, to learn it all in time. One of the great joys—and frustrations—of The Raw Shark Texts is its purposeful ambiguity. You will find that most every element can be taken two ways different, one of which underscores the validity of Concept as Tangible, and one of which indicates that Eric is deeply entrenched in a dissociative episode. I’ll warn you: the ambiguity is never resolved. Hall opts for a “The Lady or the Tiger” kind of ending which is both unsatisfying and irrefutably appropriate. The very title is a play on “Rorshach”, the famed inkblot tests that mean different things to different people. One might almost say that ambiguity is the point of the book, though I fear that’s dangerously pomo of me to say.

This book is like porn for typographers. There’s a span of about 50 pages, for instance, comprised entirely of a flipbook of a shark made entirely out of letters. The whole book is full of word art, linguistic/typographic puzzles, and funny little turns of phrase that force you to stop for just a moment and consider how the conceptual might behave if it was sudden literal or physical. This is what is so fascinating about The Raw Shark Texts. Yes, it’s well written—Hall has marvelous prose, though it does have moments where it lags or where I was unimpressed with the direction of the plot—but it’s so damned interesting that I find myself drawn into it, blind to the world until I finally turn the last page. Even then, I find myself thinking about it for days afterward, trying to piece together the clues into some kind of coherent working theory.

I suppose you could say it’s easy to write a book with no real resolution, since you tie up loose ends by simply ignoring them. Whatever structural problems The Raw Shark Texts may have, I think it more than makes up for it with its innovative media and compelling story. I heartily recommend this book, and very much look forward to Hall’s forthcoming work.

All the Sad Young Literary Men
by Keith Gessen

Stuff White People Like is the latest satirical meme sweeping the internet (well, the white people, anyway). I say this in part because I hope to make the new book part of my 52-in-52 meme, but also because it ties ever-so-neatly into my review of Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men. Because if you take the basic premise of SWPL—that is, upper-middle class intellectual whites form an incestuous subculture in which we all partake to some degree—and you turn it into a semi-serious pomo book by an upper-middle class intellectual white literary editor, you have All the Sad Literary Young Men.

Here’s my dilemma with the book: I’ll be the first one to delight in pomo literature, and self-referential jokes; I like books that bend the parallel threads of fiction and reality in until their curves finally touch. I get the inherent funniness of Gessen drawing these characters/caricatures which are simultaneously these brutally smart, educated men and also total disasters, personally and professionally. It’s a retooling of the “authenticity” argument of social conservatives—that is, painting pictures of theorists and ivory-tower academicians who are grossly out of step with the rest of the high-functioning planet.

What starts to bug me is that one of Gessen’s characters is Keith Gessen, and is likely about 98% based on the author, and 2% based on whimsy and plot expediency. Of the book’s three “overeducated” characters, Gessen is the one who actually succeeds, even if he doesn’t view it that way. Struggling Romantics, wannabe Zionists, thinly disguised versions of real-life persons (you can draw unequivocal lines to Noam Chomsky, among others): the book is pathetic to read.

So, the big question (drumroll): is Gessen, from the title page onward, skewering eastern blue-state intellectuals, graduate students, and fans of Derrida? Not likely. And yet one can’t escape the scathing critique that such people are ultimately feckless, living their presents through acquired knowledge of the past, struggling for intimacy in a self-image that doesn’t allow much for it, and the final destruction of the the idealism of one’s 20s. It’s depressing, really. Depressing, and with a plot that ultimately dribbles. The prose is wonderful, and occasionally witty, but I don’t like Gessen’s characters. Maybe we’re not supposed to like them; perhaps he made them all ultimately obnoxious on purpose, exaggerated models of social realists and Chomskyites and bibliophilic nerds who have flashes of brilliance and not much else.

I feel like Gessen’s tried to write a Great Gatsby for this new century, but it becomes more cynical, more self-aggrandizing, and ultimately more depressing: the act of being smart or knowing things has no correlation to happiness at all for Gessen’s sad literary men. It’s not a point that I support, as it seems simplistic to me. I realize I may be trying to ascribe a point to Gessen that he may not be making; it’s possible I’m wrong and this book is satire poking fun at what is inarguablly Gessen and his own crowd. Whatever the book’s context may be, I just wasn’t all that impressed with it as a work. It tried being very modern, and was excruciatingly self-conscious about it. You can read it in order to sound cool at parties, or you could read something better.

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk

I’m no stranger no Chuck Palahniuk, and perhaps that’s why in recent years my interest in his books has waned. It takes a special sort of talent to create books that are simultaneously far out in left field and maddeningly derivative.

I received Rant as a gift (signed, even!); to be honest, I’d been wanting to take up old Chuck again to see if a couple of years off had cleansed my palette a bit. Maybe enough literary sorbet meant I could once again take pleasure in highly dysfunctional people doing eccentric-and-harmful-but-curiously-symbolic things.

The verdict? Sort of. Partially, I think, Rant is a book that Palahniuk’s been meaning to write. Some of his books are better than others—I would point to Fight Club and Choke—but this seems to be the first which was actually catered somewhat to his style of writing. Ostensibly an “oral” biography, the story is told via transcribed conversations with townsfolk, friends, and family of one Buster “Rant” Casey, deceased. The text itself is every bit as weird as Palahniuk’s prior work, but the fact that the story is told in small chunks by alternating speakers finally gives validity to his stop motion narration.

Here’s the context: Buster Casey was born to Irene and Chester Casey, under some dubious circumstances. He grew up a strange boy, addicted to animal/insect bites, and so managed to live most of his life with rabies, and gave that rabies to just about everybody. The rabies epidemic becomes a major-but-unimportant plot point that combines with another somewhat heavy-handed motif, which is that Rant is set in some sort of near-future semi-dystopia, where most people have a port in the back of their necks through which sensory experience can be transmitted; also, population/infrastructure pressures have forced people to live in shifts: the Daytimers and the Nighttimers. Palahniuk gives just a very little background to this, preferring instead, I think, to make a sweeping allegorical point (he doesn’t really succeed). A poor man’s cyberpunk.

“Rant” Casey, upon moving to the big city, proceeds to make friends among the crowd of people who engage in a new kind of Nighttimer activity, wherein you drive around and attempt to dent other players’ back fenders. There’s a complicated set of rules, and you just know Palahniuk eventually explains them all, and the subtle nuances as well.

What really bothered me was that for all the exposition and story, the book ends on a strange science-fiction twist. It certainly makes for an “Ohhhhhhhh, it all makes sense!” moment, but it felt so far removed from the rest of the story that I felt suddenly transported into a different book entirely. All the Christ figure symbolism was blown away, replaced by a vague half-conclusion stealing bits of nonsense about reincarnation and pseudoscience; basically attempting to make a point out of philosophical potsherds. I feel as though if Palahniuk hadn’t strayed from the course so much at the end, Rant could have been one of his better books, foibles or no. As it stands, I can’t help but feel disappointed.

The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall

The Raw Shark Texts, when you think about it, seems right up my alley: full of word games, puns, a plot based to great degree on the mechanics of thought and language. In all honesty, I didn’t know any of that when I picked it up. My impression from reading the cover flap was that it was a heady drama about an amnesiac—some careful blend of Memento and a weepy Chuck Palahniuk. Not so much, unfortunately, on the really sweet game XIII, which was also about an amnesiac but involved more firearms.

But that is neither here nor there. My actual opinion of Steven Hall’s curious little book still hasn’t congealed; it’s currently shifting like the globules of a lava lamp, sometimes nearing incredulity at how scripted and inane it seems at points, and at others marveling at the subtle intricacies of the plot and downright cleverness of its metaphors and rhetorical footwork.

Let me give you a brief overview: Eric Sanderson wakes up in a panic with no memory and no knowledge of where or even who he is. His only clue is a letter, apparently written by his pre-amnesiac self to his post-amnesiac self with instructions. So begins Eric’s decidedly odd but remarkably dangerous journey into the narrow crevasse between the literal and the literary. It soon becomes apparent that Eric is being hunted by something præternatural, and it has ramifications much larger than he ever could have known.

In my particular American way, I lust for conclusive conclusions—very bourgeois of me, I know—but there are none to be found at the end of The Raw Shark Texts. One could probably expect just such a thing: the story itself is so maddeningly vague and playful, always dodging in and out of contexts that are comprehensible to flesh-and-blood readers, that there was never much hope of a sensible ending.

I sound critical, I suppose, but notwithstanding my initial scepticism to the book’s sudden dive into madness about 100 pages in, I enjoyed the book: Hall is an incredibly clever writer, even if some of his plot elements are kind of hackneyed. He’s got real talent as a wordsmith, and I must admit that the book held my attention throughout—I was downright anxious at some points.

Oh, and did I mention that about 50 pages of the book is nothing but a flipbook? Postmodernism, eat your heart out.

Green children perch on tiptoes to reach the crayon-wax sun, cicada-giggling to the squeak of fog-swing. The crayon is Helios Red, screaming the flesh from the mist; a dawnmoses parting the decrepit grey sea. The sun throws spears at the copper roof of the swaying birdhouse, which sloughs off the projectiles with practiced insouciance. Thus deflected, the cloying rays dance their noisome dance across his prostrate form, tangled in epic battle with restless sheets.

He’s convinced the world is better when viewed through closed eyelids. When you’re just waking up, the distinction between dream and reality is just myopic enough that you receive neither part of either world— a sort of non-existing downtime without the hope of sleep or the burnt toast of morning, and if only for a second we are treated with absolute nothing; of a monumental and somewhat metaphoric silence found elsewhere in the bottoms of brown-ringed coffee cups and the business end of post-coital cigarettes. If only for the briefest of moments we can melt away like the sun the night before, just when it settled into the horizon’s cradle and the clouds like melted butter, spilt blood, and raised bruises reached into his brain and plucked consciousness from the briny deep.

Open your eyes. Don’t move. If you’re like him, the simple act of recognizing your breath is action enough. Your cortex knocks down spiderwebs with a chemical broom.

Slide your legs across the sheets, stretching subtly. You still grasp futilely at the dusty bookends of a dream; the sort you will sometimes remember but never decipher.

Pull open the covers, blink away whatever remains of your functional memory, painful though it may be. Overcome your vertigo as you stand: if you’re dizzy as a lack of blood blots grey in your eyes, then welcome to my world.

Stagger to your bathroom, feet shuffling on the scratchy carpet. The shower, such a hot, moist arena, reminds him too much of the womb, some eternal nine-month sleep. He realizes what a terrible day it was that he emerged.

He always wonders how a baby feels when it comes to the joyous moment; if a naked, shriveled baby honestly gives a good goddamn about the miracle of birth—or if, more likely the only thing an infant wants to do is escape the frigid, raucous, glaring outer world by crawling back into the reactor core and sleeping for æons. Body fluids all tend to be similar: it’s just as easy to dream in a sac of amniotic fluid as it is with a pool of warm blood or hot semen. Sleep waxes violent and sexual and wonderful, but rarely tangible. He supposes that makes it more art than vice.

The closest facsimile of conception is sleep.

By the time he steps out of the shower, he is naked, wet, shivering, and still thoroughly muddled with blur and amnesia. Understand that waking is reliving a trauma. Remember that the day you came into this world was the first day of the rest of your life.

But this isn’t really about you, is it? It’s about him, and while he stumbles around this morning, eyes thick casks of blindness, he begins to realize how little difference it really makes.

§§

Outside, defying coffee cups, the world grinds on, its sky a hot blue industry, its verdure a terrible engine of creation—ceaseless streams of visceral language cascade like similes from the big dumb grin of that idioglottic sun.

He watches the birds, incensed by their chattering song. You can see his full mug, filled with the dark product of his own industry. Silver steam kisses the harshness of his stubble, thrown into a stark curve by the impetus of his scowl.

Watching him stand restlessly at the window, you understand intimately the way he clicks his tongue when he talks; the ratcheting noise of his rubber soles; the phenomenon of his faithless swagger; the way he knows, in some imperceptible way, that you know this about him.

Remember, when you’re just waking up, the distinction between fact and fiction is just amblyopic enough that you receive neither vice of either mode. And as he struggles to grasp some narrative thread on which to hang his day, he finds the lines of his biography have ceded to impressionistic gestures and the foreign tongue of a broken fourth wall.

§§

The copper birdhouse roof still glints petulantly, perhaps representing the insistent demand for precise mapping of elegantly symbolic storytelling to its corresponding semiotic. Conveniently unnamed, he has finished his coffee, chosen his tie—it is paisley, today—cursed the birds, forgotten the abstrusity of last night’s dream, consumed a poached egg and an apricot and a piece of buttered toast; he has done all this without the benefit of language or preface, leaving the epistemological a priori of the world he inhabits a large and imposing question mark in the minds of those nosy, voyeuristic authors and audiences who seek to fetishize the mechanics of his sleeping, waking, percolating, fornicating and querulously wonder after his continued acceptance of the copper-roofed birdhouse outside his window, which is beginning to oxidize anyway and hasn’t been filled in godonlyknows how long. Now, as you watch him climb in his car, you are intimately aware—because you are reading it—that he is filled with doubt involving the nature of the Self-with-a-capital-S, mostly because the god to whom he does not subscribe is an author with a predisposition to sesquipedality and romantic irony. Having dedicated his morning to the pursuit of metafiction, he now leaves, as all characters do, to spend time enjoying the visceral pleasures of acts sadly beyond our discursive limits.

§§

The sun hurls its invective at the oxidizing copper roof of a birdhouse just outside my window, which sloughs off the heat with practiced insouciance. Thus deflected, the maddening rays dance their noisome dance across my prostrate form, tangled in epic battle with restless sheets.

I’m convinced the world is better when viewed through closed eyelids. When you’re just waking up, the distinction between dream and reality is just myopic enough that you receive neither part of either world— a sort of non-existing downtime without the hope of sleep or the burnt toast of morning, and if only for a second we are treated with absolute nothing.

The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde

I happened upon Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair entirely by accident (though for the life of me I don’t remember how). I seem to have a particular weakness for British charm when it comes to books, and so I resolved to at least read this, the first book in Fforde’s Thursday Next series.

It’s difficult to describe the world that Fforde has made. It’s 1985, but a strange sort of 1985, perhaps some splinter reality similar but fundamentally different from ours. It’s a strange blend of crime novel, science fiction, fantasy, and outright parody. Time travel features heavily, though it is not fundamental to the plot (does that make sense?). Thursday Next is an agent with SpecOps-27, known colloquially as LiteraTec, a branch of England’s modular law enforcement agency. In this alternate reality, literature and art are subjects of intense passion: in the same way that people on our world fight about religious differences, the Englanders of Fforde’s novel fight about the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, or the relative benefits of surrealism versus traditional Dickensian literature. The plot shortly begins to involve vampires, and time travel, and the fantastical coming alive of famous books.

To be honest, I think Fforde tries to do a bit too much world-building. Certainly, all of his inventiveness is laudable, but there’s so many references that don’t do anything but serve as forgettable jokes or digs against a particular precept that his reality has preempted. I fundamentally like Fforde’s idea: his world, where literature is a subject of so much passion, is not only clever and engaging, but rife with subtext as well. It gets a bit sidetracked with all his tries to accomplish, however. Fforde is no poet, either: his writing is a trifle stilted and dull. It’s only the curious nature of his characters, and the readers’ genuine interest in the worldbuilding, that keep the narrative afloat.

Even though the book’s devices are as apt to fail as succeed, I still believed it engaging enough that I will read the sequel, if only to tip me to either side of the fence. If you’re at all interesting in quirky fiction, I’d recommend you at least give The Eyre Affair a try.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a murder mystery: we find that out in the introduction. We also learn that Blue van Meer, our narrator, is writing this book during her freshman year at Harvard, and that she’s insufferably literate, citing some book, article, or movie (real or imagined) just about every other sentence. But much is made of the death of one Hannah Schneider, whose relationship to Blue isn’t clearly advertised.

The book begins At the Beginning, by which I mean that Blue starts by narrating her childhood and family life (or lack thereof) and the murder itself doesn’t happen until about page 400. No kidding: the murder is ⁴/₅ of the way through the book, and then is solved mostly by bookwork and deductive reasoning.

No, it’s not really fair to call Special Topics… a murder mystery, because it feels to me as though that portion of the plot is incidental. More accurately, this startling debut from Marisha Pessl is a sort of warped, hyperliterate bildungsroman that follows the senior year of Blue at the über-preppy St. Gallway school in a mountain town of North Carolina.

This book, to me, was paradoxical, because its style of writing was very much adult, but its content, for the most part, was the sort of unbearable teen lit pablum—oh, the New Girl is accepted by the Cool Kids, but ends up Becoming One of Them—that would be more at home in something by Stephen Chbosky. At the same time, Pessl’s tone throughout stays sardonic, a fact she underlines by frequent use of Capitalized Phrases, mocking things she sees as part of some complicated high school social canon.

What I would be most interested to know is if the absurd amount of title-dropping (I’m serious, it’s out of control) is simply an artifact of Blue’s character, or if it’s a nasty habit of the book’s somewhat postmodern author. As I said, it’s her first book, so only time will tell.

Many reviews I’ve read of the book make much hay of its density, and point that out as a flaw. Donna Rifkind at the Washington Post says “hunkering down for 514 pages of frantic literary exhibitionism turns into a weary business for the reader, who after much patient effort deserves to feel something stronger than appreciation for a lot of clever name-dropping and a rush of metaphors.” I feel I must disagree, at least in my case. The book was difficult only at first: once I became accustomed to the style, and the plot gained a head of steam, I found it hard to put the book down. It’s ending was, to be sure, a little infuriating, and a lot implausible, but in postmodern fashion, the book became that which it talked about, having only shortly before the end talked about the American desire for conclusive endings and how this robs the reader/viewer of the ability to think and imagine.

Galatea 2.2
by Richard Powers

I received Galatea 2.2 as a birthday gift from my brother—previously, I had never heard of Powers, which now surprises me insofar as he seems the sort of enigmatic literary marvels that I seek desperately to find. I resolved to begin as soon as I had finished the books currently on my plate.

Let me be upfront about something: this novel is one of the damnedest things I’ve read in a long time, and I make no claim of understanding it. In short, the book is a mix of autobiography and fiction: Powers writes about a character named Richard Powers, who has written Richard Powers’ books—we can assume that the Powers qua character, at the time the novel begins, is a more or less historically accurate version of Powers qua author. It’s all very PoMo. On a year’s fellowship at a large state school, Powers gets involved with one Phillip Lentz, an arrogant, iconoclastic researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. By some machination of the plot involving a wager, Powers ends up working with him to create an AI that pass a Turing Test as a 22-year-old student of Lit Crit.

But this is merely one half of the plot. Interspersed is Power qua character’s (qua author?) flashbacks to his 10-year relationship with a Dutch girl known only as C., during which he writes the books that make him famous and ends up living for a short time in the Netherlands. This, I might add, is the strangest damn relationship I’ve ever read about, and the reader is not at all engendered to C.: she’s moody, prone to fits of lunacy, and never, it seems, happy.

The crux of the book is Powers’ involvement with the AI project. After several iterations, the longest-latest one is known as Implementation H, which Powers names Helen. Over the course of between 6 and 9 months, he teaches it literature while he writes a new book in fits and starts, lusting after a new woman called A. while becoming disconsolate over his failed relationship with C. One gets the feeling that he is more or less a failure at life, and he enacts this failure in his teaching of—and eventual emotional attachment to—Helen. It’s a warped retelling of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, something which Powers qua author is quite well aware: at one point, he mentions ELIZA, an early “joke” AI. But Powers qua character more or less creates Helen’s personality, shapes it as Henry Higgins turned Eliza Doolittle into a passable English lady…. first under the auspices of a bet, but with greater and greater personal attachment. The only difference is that Henry Higgins didn’t regale the audience with an extra hour of wailing introspection.

Galatea 2.2 isn’t verbally dense in the way that, say, Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses are, requiring a semester of study just to wade through the mud-thick pool of rhetoric; still, it manages to be extraordinarily complex in the way that Powers spins his words into complicated webs. It’s not quite verbal masturbation, but a precise, intricate sort of narration that is both constantly self-referential and maddeningly allusory. He has a particular gift with language, I’ll give him that, though I call shenanigans when it comes to his technical writing. I understand that he was a programmer at one point, and I understand that this book was written in 1995, but I get the feeling that he tries very hard to make sure that his explanation of technical aspects is more complicated than it needs to be. Malapropistic, basically. Not in a “Ted ‘Series of Tubes’ Stevens” sort of way, but in a supercilious “I know that the technical standard for audio CDs is called ‘Red Book’ and I’m going to rub it in your face by using the term even though it’s meaningless to you” sort of way.

This book is exceedingly neat—it has enough talk about AI to keep geeks interested; it has enough literary allusions to keep the most daring of English students on his or her toes; furthermore, it raises some damn good questions about trying to create an associative entity like a brain, the sheer breadth and ability that is involved in such a task. It’s a subject that could have filled a book ten times it size. For all it’s quirks—and rest assured, Galatea 2.2 has them—it’s still an excellent book that will leave you thinking long after you’ve turned the last page.