Book review: Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement
October 1st, 2009 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Arts, Books, Editor's Desk, News, Sarasota-Manatee
Consistency isn’t a very sexy story when it comes to artists: We prefer to tell tales of hard-living wild-eyed fanatics who drop inexplicable masterpieces rather than those of steady, productive craftsmen who poke their heads above the surface every couple years with yet another high-quality work. Which goes a bit towards explaining why Richard Powers — who has cranked out nine novels since his 1985 debut, and is set to release his 10th, titled Generosity: An Enhancement, next week — seems to have flown below the radar of the popular imagination.
Such a fate is unjust, and a bit surprising, because while Powers trades in brainy topics — artificial intelligence, genetics, classical music — in his novels, he also takes very seriously the emotions of love and friendship, and most of his works revolve around couples coming together or coming undone.
Generosity is no exception: The book tells the story of a cloistered writer who lands an unexpected job teaching creative nonfiction at a Chicago college. In class he meets a young woman from Algeria, whose constant ebullience baffles everyone around her. The book spills out into many other side plots: The writer falls in love with a woman similarly awestruck by the Algerian, a science research company dead set on discovering the genetics of mood sets its sights on the woman, a pop science TV host suddenly comes to question her role in said company’s cause.
Powers is a hell of a writer, equally capable of weighing in on the case of Nature vs. Nurture and describing the terrible joy of a winter blackout. He also accomplishes a first in my reading life: He offers the first lucid fictional description of America’s instant-media environment, as an article about the Algerian woman snowballs into vicious blog posts, into Facebook status updates, into text messaging, into common slang. Let it not be said that Powers is afraid to entertainingly engage with the mind-bending stupidity of contemporary U.S. life. All the more reason why both Generosity and Powers deserve a wider audience.
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