“The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is a nightmare beyond measure.”
Plot: Research scientists (geneticists even) in love! My kind of story. it doesn't work out and one half ends up in a dead end programming job years later. What happened? A lapsed ph.D. student (what other kind is there?) whom he works with wants to find out. Enlisting the help of a librarian with whom he will fall in love with, he sets out to crack the code, as it were. It does help to recall that DNA is composed of two strands of interlocking chains.
Why read it?: Stuart Ressler, one of the 4 main characters, is a great creation. We never know of how a good part of his life transpires as their is a big chunk of it that is never explained. Even so, we can fill in the blanks quite easily based on what we discover before and after. Considered a scientific dropout and footnote, he instead has realigned his life to a more personal study of life.
Plus, Powers sees how so much of life is interconnected. Ressler learns to hear life in music, in the stories of his colleague's past. The title of this book has so many allusions, and they all matter.
Richard Powers is obviously a really intelligent person. He received a MacArthur fellowship in 1989, has a MA in literature, has studied neuroscience, worked as a computer programmer, and is apparently an accomplished musician. What I find best about his work is his ability to see connections among disparate aspects of life, and then ponder what those connections mean. I have read several of his books (Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance, Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark and The Echo Maker); to be honest, most of them haven't stayed with me too well - they tended to get a little too much into the head of the characters and I couldn't figure out exactly what they were really seeing too much of the time. However, Gold Bug Variations, written in 1991, is an exception.
This might be because the subject is in the same general subject area that I did my dissertation research on. The book involves two parallel love stories, one in the 1950's, and another in the 80's. That they are parallel is only fitting as the book winds around the search for how the structure of DNA functions in heredity. Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young post-doc, is working on that question. Initially incredibly devoted to his work, Stuart enters into an affair with a married coworker. Years in the future, Stuart is an anonymous night shift computer programmer. A fellow programmer (and fellow academic dropout, but this time in art history) Franklin Todd wonders what happened to Stuart. If you have much knowledge of the history of DNA research, it isn't too hard to figure out where Franklin got his name. He enlists the help of Jan, a local research librarian, to help in his quest (the title of the book should give you the idea that there is a mystery inside), and these two fall in love, despite Jan being involved with someone else as the story begins.
Thrown on top of all this is the music by Bach, and done by Glenn Gould - Gould never actually gets mentioned by name in the story, but he is there all the time. The inherent formal, mathematical structure of the variations provides the structure for the novel (the number of chapters, the way the book ebbs and flows in action, etc), while Gould seems to represent the emotion that is hidden inside it. Gould being such a immensely weird person who ran to his own peculiar rhythm also provides a bit of a thing to consider. While Stuart Ressler is searching for the essence of life and heredity in science, he becomes aware and immersed in the emotional aspects of life which he had ignored most of his life. gain, the parallel structure of the stories (and DNA guide what goes on. In one pairing, we have a woman who desperately wants children but is unable to do so; in the other a woman who has chosen not to have children and the complications that ensue from that.
In the end, we find that as much as we can, and should, attempt to understand the physical complexities of life, we can't control much of it, particularly that which is in our hearts. This is a great book to read over and over, although its fairly hefty. You can always find something you overlooked before. This book is written from Jan's point of view, which seemed a bit odd at times, as Powers is not at his best writing from a woman's point of view, I think, but it wasn't that distracting. Maybe because Jan is a bit of an odd person anyway.
One of the overarching ideas is that no matter how hard we look for the essence of human existence, science will never give us the final answer, because human emotion and love are unknowable. And perhaps our DNA knows this. While we view it, and rightly so, as an incredibly efficient system for allowing life to continue and evolve, it is, like us, a system replete with errors. And not incidentally, the title also is an allusion to one of Poe's works, which as I recall, is considered among the first detective stories ever written.
Highly recommended.
