The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers

The Gold Bug Variations has been on my "to-read" list for a decade. In the meantime, I read two other Richard Powers books, including The Time of Our Singing, which I thought was one of the best novels I had read in years. Thus, I was motivated to read this book--and it was a good thing because, without motivation, I never would have made it through this challenging book.

The Gold Bug Variations has three main characters and narratives that occur in three time periods. One character, Jan O'Deigh, is a librarian who narrates the stories in two of the time periods. In 1983, she is approached by Franklin Todd, an ABD art historian who is working the night shift in a data-processing plant; Todd wants to know more about his coworker, Dr. Stuart Ressler, whom Jan soon discovers was an up-and-coming DNA researcher at the University of Illinois in the mid-50s. Jan and Todd (who fall in love) are determined to learn how Ressler came to be working a dead-end job, listening over and over to Bach's Goldberg Variations; their quest to understand him, their love affair, and other events of 1983-84 make up the first narrative. The second narrative is the story of Ressler's year in Urbana, a year in which he fell in love with a married colleague, watched others of his colleagues deteriorate, and made a breakthrough in understanding DNA coding. In the third narrative, Dr. Ressler has died, Todd is missing, and Jan has quit her job to spend a year trying to understand Ressler's early work. For much of the book, it feels like little happens in any of the three narratives, although each comes to something of a climax near the end of the book.

Many of the book's 600+ pages are devoted to the science of DNA, Bach's music, and the metaphorical connections between the two. The text is also rife with literary allusions, some metaphors based on computer programming, and puns (the title itself is a double pun--on Bach's work and a Poe short story). If I were smarter or willing to work harder, I'm sure the book would have been more meaningful to me. Being who I am, however, I can admire Powers's command of so many different subjects and his ability to connect them, but I cannot really say I enjoyed this book or found the deep meaning I'm sure is there. Still, I'm planning to read Powers's new book, Generosity, in which he returns to genetics.

Favorite passage:
But just because translation is everywhere necessary, it doesn't follow that it's possible. . . . What I say depends on what I say it with.

What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder as much as our capacity to feel it.

Of interest:
Powers is a faculty member (and alum) of my alma mater, the University of Illinois. The alumni magazine had an interesting article about him a couple of years ago: http://www.uiaa.org/illinois/news/illinoisalumni/1107_b.html
He is also a former winner of the Macarthur "Genius" grant.