06/01: The Goldbug Variations: BOOK CORNER by Trent Owings, Pastor, Lansdowne Christian Church
It has been a good many years ago that I first read a glowing review for a novel titled The Goldbug Variations by a novelist unknown to me up to that moment named Richard Powers. I have been reading his novels ever since. He is to me one of the most daring and rewarding novelists of our time. He is daring because of the larger issues of the culture he is willing to tackle, and one of the most fluent and engaging writers I have ever read. Among his most interesting and ambitious books are; Gattica 2.2, a novel about artificial intelligence, that is, the creation of a self aware complex computer; Plowing the Dark, about the creation of artificial environments, one strand the captivity by terrorist of a suspected informant and how they determine what environment he will be confined to, and the other strand, a company seeking to recreate environments, again by computer; Gain, two parallel stories; one about the history of a company that starts out as a business that makes soaps, which grows into a modern conglomerate that makes all manner of cleaning products, and the other of a woman who contracts and fights cancer; and The Time of our Singing a novel about a mixed race family and its two sons who are talented musicians. I have never read any writing about the experience of making music and listening to it as is in this book.
Powers newest novel is Generosity; an Enhancement. The characters in this novel include a rather failed writer who gets hired by a community college in Chicago to teach a class in creative non-fiction; a psychologist who is a staff member of the counseling center for the college, and a scientist who studies genetics and its role in human attributes and psychological states.
In the class the writer teaches is a young immigrant woman who has fled Algeria in a time of upheaval and violence and who has lost most members of her family to that violence. What the teacher and the other members of the class notice and are drawn to, is the buoyant and continuously happy state of the young woman. This character shows up in her class participation, in her relationship with her class mates and it even shows up in the writing she does for the class. The teacher wonders about the girls constant state of euphoria and how it affects the class and he worries about her because he is afraid it might not make her cautious and aware as someone who lives in a city like Chicago might need to be. He makes contact with the psychologist and she becomes involved with and interested in, the girl. They both wonder at the constant happiness and contentment of the girl. As the story unfolds word of this girl and her state get out. The scientist wants to study her, and manages to get her to spend a day or so with him at his lab in Boston. He does an analysis of her DNA and thinks he might have found the gene complex which has caused this to happen. He writes a paper and gives the girl another name to protect her privacy, but the paper has an immediate and widespread affect. The girl’s real name becomes known. She agrees to appear on the talk show of an”Oprah” like host in Chicago. She is deluged with requests for friendship, for advice, delegations from churches who think she might be an angel, or have a secret that can be taught. And the scientist begins to test the waters for turning his discovery into a marketable treatment to reshape the genes in others so that such happiness and contentment might be universally available.
What Powers has done in an entertaining some times humorous way, is to explore the way we as a culture yearn for what we do not have and many times have it suggested to us that we can have what we yearn for by means of science and medication. I have yet to finish the last 30 or 40 pages to find out how it all ends, but if I had read it I would not have reported it here. Its always good to find out the end by your own reading.
Trent
Powers newest novel is Generosity; an Enhancement. The characters in this novel include a rather failed writer who gets hired by a community college in Chicago to teach a class in creative non-fiction; a psychologist who is a staff member of the counseling center for the college, and a scientist who studies genetics and its role in human attributes and psychological states.
In the class the writer teaches is a young immigrant woman who has fled Algeria in a time of upheaval and violence and who has lost most members of her family to that violence. What the teacher and the other members of the class notice and are drawn to, is the buoyant and continuously happy state of the young woman. This character shows up in her class participation, in her relationship with her class mates and it even shows up in the writing she does for the class. The teacher wonders about the girls constant state of euphoria and how it affects the class and he worries about her because he is afraid it might not make her cautious and aware as someone who lives in a city like Chicago might need to be. He makes contact with the psychologist and she becomes involved with and interested in, the girl. They both wonder at the constant happiness and contentment of the girl. As the story unfolds word of this girl and her state get out. The scientist wants to study her, and manages to get her to spend a day or so with him at his lab in Boston. He does an analysis of her DNA and thinks he might have found the gene complex which has caused this to happen. He writes a paper and gives the girl another name to protect her privacy, but the paper has an immediate and widespread affect. The girl’s real name becomes known. She agrees to appear on the talk show of an”Oprah” like host in Chicago. She is deluged with requests for friendship, for advice, delegations from churches who think she might be an angel, or have a secret that can be taught. And the scientist begins to test the waters for turning his discovery into a marketable treatment to reshape the genes in others so that such happiness and contentment might be universally available.
What Powers has done in an entertaining some times humorous way, is to explore the way we as a culture yearn for what we do not have and many times have it suggested to us that we can have what we yearn for by means of science and medication. I have yet to finish the last 30 or 40 pages to find out how it all ends, but if I had read it I would not have reported it here. Its always good to find out the end by your own reading.
Trent
