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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : W.W. Norton & Company [2014]
Language
English
Main Author
Richard Powers, 1957- (-)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
369 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780393240825
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IS IT PREMATURE to talk of the "Powers Problem"? For the last three decades, Richard Powers has been bringing out hefty novels at the rate of one every 2.5 years: 11 in all. At his current age of 56, he is, as a novelist, midway on life's path; presumably he has another 11 or so novels still in him. Powers has won a National Book Award and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; he has been the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant"; he has elicited lavish praise from the critics - most of them, anyway. Two of the words most frequently employed in connection with his literary output are "cerebral" and "ambitious." "Cerebral" refers to his tendency to lace his novels with scientific and scholarly themes, like artificial intelligence in "Galatea 2.2," game theory in "Prisoner's Dilemma" and musicology cum genetic recombination in "The Gold Bug Variations." "Ambitious" refers to his penchant for fashioning narrative structures and symbolic networks on a heroic scale. These words cut both ways. "Cerebral" suggests a surfeit of ideas at the expense of life: more head than heart. And "ambitious" . . . well, that's a terrible thing to say about a writer of novels; it's like calling a politician "brave." It suggests that the novelist has set aims for himself that he is doubtfully capable of attaining. And for Powers's severest critics, the aim at which he signally fails is that of creating fully human characters with interesting motives and emotions. His rather conventional stories of love and loss, they say, never take flight. As the critic James Wood put it in The New Yorker, Powers "makes beautiful connections between concepts (genetics, music, computers, consciousness, memory), but primitive and mechanistic connections between his characters." Everyone concedes that Powers is prodigiously talented. Besides being fearfully erudite, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life. He has every gift, it is sometimes implied, but the gift of literature. That is our Powers Problem. Each new novel he produces becomes an occasion to ask whether this time, at last, he has succeeded in fusing ideas and life into an organic whole. In "Orfeo," the ideas have to do (again) with genetics and music. The life is that of an avant-garde composer named Peter Els, who, as the novel opens, is a washed-up 70-year-old living in a college town in Pennsylvania. Peter, we learn, has had a lifelong passion for abstract patterns - patterns that, he fondly hopes, will allow him "to break free of time and hear the future." He once pursued such patterns in the realm of experimental music, only to leave audiences nonplused by his innovative compositions ("36 variations on 'All You Need Is Love,' in the style of everyone from Machaut to Piston"). Now, in his solitary retirement, he has moved on to DNA. In his kitchen he has set up an amateur genetics lab. Using equipment ordered from online biopunk shops, he is trying to manipulate the genome of a common (but not necessarily harmless) bacterium, Serratia marcescens. His goal is to splice musical patterns into living cells. Let us defer, for the moment, the question of whether this is an admirable goal, or even a sane one. We have more to discover about Peter Els. And we are soon to do so when suspicions about his biohacking lead to a raid by hazmat-suit-clad agents of Homeland Security and, in a panic, he takes flight. "Flight," it might be noticed, is in Latin fuga, the root of "fugue." And the rest of the novel, indeed, has something of a musical structure. As Peter - soon labeled by the media the "Bioterrorist Bach" - hits the road, he hatches a scheme to achieve the transcendence he has always sought. In counterpoint with this final journey of redemption, the story of the fugitive's life is retrospectively told. This story (it appears to me) comprises four movements, each dominated by a character Peter has loved, flourished with and finally become estranged from: his girlfriend when he was a teenager, an elfin student cellist with "four feet of hair," whose breasts he held as he discovered the depths of musical passion; his ex-wife, who sustained him (up to a point) as he struggled to invent a radically new musical language in the delirious 1960s; his turbulent friend and artistic collaborator, who draws him into composing a historical opera that becomes a succès de scandale when it seems to presage the fiery finale to the F.B.I.'s 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex.; and his daughter, whom he calls "my only decent composition" even though she regards his whole life as "naïve and misguided." These characters are not free of the flaws Powers is often taxed with. They can be clunkily sentimental; they descend to cliché ("We had energy. We had ideas"); their motives are sometimes conventional, sometimes obscure. Nor is the patented lyricism of Powers's writing always effective. For every happy hit ("The predawn sky was beginning to peach"), there's a wince-maker like "skirting a cairn of cat turd" - the full horror of which is apparent only if you realize that "cairn" is pronounced "kern." Why, then, was I unable to resist the emotional pull of "Orfeo"? Why did I pick it up eagerly each day and find myself moist-eyed when I came to its last pages? That, I think, has everything to do with Powers's skill at putting us into the mind of his protagonist. Peter Els is blessed (or cursed) with an almost painfully exquisite musical sensibility. Throughout "Orfeo" we experience tonal patterns of all kinds - from bird song to the overtone series of a single piano note to the "caldera of noise" at a John Cage happening and the "naked pain" in the Largo of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony - filtered through Peter's lyrical consciousness. In one of the novel's most virtuosic passages, which goes on for a dozen pages, Peter dilates on the transcendent beauties of Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," composed and first performed in the brutal conditions of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. All of which heightens and makes unbearably poignant Peter's own losing struggle to "recover a fugitive language" that might capture something of eternity. If only this struggle hadn't led him to tinker with the genome of a bacterium! I say this not for public safety reasons but for aesthetic ones. Peter has come to see, in molecular genetics, a quasi-musical language. Encoded in the millions of base pairs of DNA, he imagines, are "astonishing synchronized sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B minor sound like a jump-rope jingle." If he could insert a little pattern of his own into the bacterial DNA, then that unheard "music" might enjoy a sort of immortality, perhaps surviving the destruction of mankind. But this is not a beautiful idea, as Peter seems to think. It is a slightly obscene one. The DNA in any organism encodes, in nature's own language, a detailed history of the environment in which that organism evolved. It is a knowledge-bearing structure, a sort of poem composed by time and chance. To alter even a bit of it for would-be artistic purposes is tantamount to aesthetic vandalism - like spraying a graffiti message on the Parthenon. Does Richard Powers believe his protagonist's idea is beautiful? It is, of course, a fallacy to attribute the views of a fictional character to its author - even if, in the case of Peter Els, the character has been given hair identical to that of the author ("A gray but still-thick Beatles mop hangs in his eyes"). But I can't help thinking that the emotional power of "Orfeo" is diminished a little by this unhappy genetic conceit. It seems that the Powers Problem - producing novels that are more head than heart - has here turned into its opposite. JIM HOLT is the author of "Why Does the World Exist?"

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 26, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Retired composer Peter Els has an unusual hobby, do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Is his work dangerous? We're not sure, but when hazmat-suited government agents descend on his home, he flees, becoming perhaps the world's least likely suspected terrorist, the biohacker Bach. On his prolonged cross-country journey, we learn Els' life story in flashback: how he fell in love with music and with a woman, went to school at the height of the avant garde, and began a lifelong struggle between the urge to invent and the need to please. World events, from JFK's assassination to 9/11 to H5N1, provide a kind of tragic meter. Els' leap from music to genetics seems forced at first, but Powers (a National Book Award winner for The Echo Maker, 2006) plays the long game, sure-handedly building a rich metaphor in which composition is an analog for other kinds of human invention, with all the beauty and terror that implies. Like his protagonist, he makes art that challenges rather than reassures his audience. Powers has a way of rendering the world that makes it seem familiar and alien, friendly and frightening. He is sometimes criticized as too cerebral, but when the story's strands knit fully together in the final act, the effect is heartbreaking and beautiful.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Seventy-year-old Peter Els, a divorced and retired adjunct professor living in suburban Pennsylvania, is the latest protagonist from Powers (who won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker). When Els's dog has a heart attack, police respond to his 911 call and stumble into a room converted into an amateur biochemical engineering lab. While Els doesn't have malicious intent-this is just the final phase of a life spent enthralled with creation, first musical, now chemical-the Feds are suspicious. Rapidly, Els becomes a fugitive from the law and a presumed domestic bioterrorist. As he flees west, he visits the people who have shaped his life, but are now estranged from him-his ex-wife, his ever-eccentric creative partner, his anxious daughter. The backstory of Els's life, from childhood to the present, is woven expertly through his escape narrative. The shy, clarinet-toting boy is as believable as the young man in love, the awestruck father, and the out-of-touch husband. But the scenes at the University of Illinois in the 1960s-where John Cage stages epic musical performance pieces and Els, inspired, creates his own- are the most vivid. Powers's talent for translating avant-garde music into engrossing vignettes on the page is inexhaustible. Els's obsession with avant-garde music, which isolates him from everyone he loves, becomes the very thing that aligns him with the reader. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Peter Els is an eccentric, musically gifted genius who inadvertently becomes the target of government security forces and is forced to hit the road and hide. The novel maintains two tracks. The first traces Peter's past, from his early discovery of his innate intellectual gifts through his educational career and life as a composer of unique and largely unappreciated music. In his past life, Peter married a fellow artist, and they moved to the Boston area, had a daughter, and were happy, but the pressures of family life clashed with his inner artist, and the marriage broke up. The second track finds the 70-year-old Peter in the present, living a reclusive life in a small Pennsylvania college town, when a misunderstanding leads the police to his door. Peter has been experimenting with DNA alteration and disease-spreading bacteria in relation to music, which is what has the feds on full alert. VERDICT This latest from National Book Award winner Powers (The Echo Maker) is concerned with advanced scientific technologies and musical theory that allow the author to riff on arcane vocabularies, but the stories of the Elses and their friends provide another, more human dimension to this very well-written and philosophical work. [See Prepub Alert, 7/8/13.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The earmarks of the renowned novelist's work are here--the impressive intellect, the patterns connecting music and science and so much else, the classical grounding of the narrative--but rarely have his novels been so tightly focused and emotionally compelling. With his "genius" certified by a MacArthur grant, Powers (Generosity, 2009, etc.) has a tendency to intimidate some readers with novels overstuffed with ideas that tend to unfold like multilayered puzzles. His new one (and first for a new publisher) might be a good place for newcomers to begin while rewarding the allegiance of his faithful readership. His Orpheus of the updated Greek myth (which the novel only loosely follows) is a postmodern composer who lost his family to his musical quest; his teaching position to his age and the economy; and his early aspirations to study chemistry to the love of a musical woman who left him. At the start of the novel, he is pursuing his recent hobby in his home lab as "a do-it-yourself genetic engineer," hoping for "only one thing before he dies: to break free of time and hear the future." Otherwise, his motives remain a mystery to the reader and to the novel's other characters, particularly after discovery of his DNA experiments (following the death of his faithful dog and musical companion, Fidelio) sends him on the lam as a suspected bioterrorist and turns his story viral. While rooted in Greek mythology, this is a very contemporary story of cybertechnology, fear run rampant, political repression of art and the essence of music (its progression, its timelessness). "How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?" asks protagonist Peter Els, surely one of the most soulful characters that the novelist has ever conjured. Els looks back over his life for much of the narrative, showing how his values, priorities, quests and misjudgments have (inevitably?) put him into the predicament where he finds itself. By the author's standards, this is taut, trim storytelling, though it characteristically makes all sorts of connections and proceeds on a number of different levels.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.