Customer Reviews

Galatea 2. 2

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Last year I added Powers' The Gold Bug Variations to my favorites list (a set of roughly 100 novels and stories that I consider the best things to have passed my way) and stated then that I would have to find out if his other novels had the same appeal for me. When scouring the used bookstore shelves, his name is often the one I start with, hoping to find a copy of his rare first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Instead, I often saw copies of his fourth--Operation Wandering Soul--which I have decided to pass for the moment. Then I discovered this one. Powers again on science, this time artificial consciousness. Sounded like a winner to me.

I knew it wouldn't be the same as The Gold Bug Variations. That novel had a *sine qua none* aspect of perfection that I doubted could be matched even by its author. What I had not expected was a meditation on that book--a reflection or introspection of his career as a novelist to date. The main character in Galatea 2.2 is a man named Richard Powers, a man who has written three novels and is just finishing his fourth as the book opens. The novels have the same titles and subjects as those of the author of this book, but can we assume that the protagonist and the author are the same? (One branch of literary theory says that no author is the same between books. That as soon as any single work is finished, that author is unattainable--dead, so to speak, to the world. I was surreptitiously referring to this above.) Why is it an issue? Because the Powers displayed herein is so flawed that you don't want to believe it is the same person. Yes, I still have that silly illusion that authors can somehow be better than the rest of us, to be above spite and greed and depression. But one has only to look at oneself to see the problem with that belief. How Powers comes across in his novels (the implied narrator) is different than how he is in "real life." I also suspect that it is different than how he sees himself as well.

The self-examination is only half of this book (an extremely interesting half, to be sure, as we come to learn the "reality" behind his "meteoric" publishing career). Interspersed with that story is a year that the protagonist spends as Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. He first finds himself at odds, spending his days as a hermit before this new thing called the Internet that allows him to travel the world from his desktop. One night, while in his armchair travels, he hears a repeated strain of music from down the hall. Investigating, he meets Lentz, an acerbic researcher into neural nets. A chance encounter between the two at an university bar the next week, and Powers is drawn into a wager in which he must learn the limits of machine intelligence and reveal his soul to Lentz, who strangely has become his friend and antagonist.

I can't tell you if the science is any good--it is way beyond my Liberal Arts comprehension--but the characters are great, even if some of them aren't the kind of people you would want to share research with. Powers captures the pure upmanship of science perfectly; the arrogance, the exaggeration, the doubt, the disinclination. When he says that he was a failed physics student, we can take him at his word, but, contrary to his stated belief here, he is not a failed observer of the human condition.

This may have been a therapeutic exercise for the author. It is if we believe the character of Richard Powers shares some of the same emotions with the author. For the rest of us, it has some benefit as well, a view of success that questions itself and a glimpse into one of the most important things in life: balance.

While I was reading Galatea, I was entranced. The book tells two stories side by side. In one, the protagonist (not coincidentally also named Richard Powers) is a washed-up author enlisted by a computational neuroscientist to train a artifical neural net to parse, understand, and comment on English literature. The others is Powers' fictionalized autobiography, describing his ultimately failed 10-year relationship with the unnamed woman C.

Both stories are beautiful. They warn you in advance they are going to break your heart, but they proceed to do so with such an honest approach to human inadequacy and regret that although the end is filled with sentiment, it has earned the right to that sentiment. There was not a character in the book I did not love.

In the science fiction storyline, Powers uses a highly novel approach to the genre: actually writing about science and scientists. The story of discovery proceeds incrementally through several tweaks and re-implementations of the developing artificial intelligence. It is one of the few novels I have read that adequately captures the feeling of doing research in a highly speculative field, but does so without becoming tedious. Similarly, the scientists Powers works with have fully developed lives outside their research. One gets the feeling that these are real people that you would like to know yourself, people with lives that the book only scratches the surface of.

The autobiography is also well-conducted, being about himself without being self-indulgent. From the beginning of his relationship with C., Powers simply expresses regret over his inability to be the person C. needed him to be at any given time until the assymetry of their relationship hollows it out and kills it. He often dwells on what he would have liked to have done at each step in its decay, and how far short his actual actions fell of those unvoiced desires. This part of the story is simply an honest look at the fear of living up to one's intentions and regret for having not done so.

After I finished, though, I was unsatisfied. Each part of the book raises difficult, important issues: What does it mean to have consciousness? What is meaning, anyway? What role does literature have in the modern world? How can people let the ones they love know that? To what extent can we really know another human being? Is there hope for human civilization? Yet in each instance, Powers not only shies away from trying to answer, but refrains from even giving hope that an answer might exist. All he can say is that he would like to make some moving, profound statement, but is either powerless to act or inhibited from doing so.

Though a pleasure to read, both for its wit and its heartbreaking honesty, in my final analysis, Galatea disappoints. This book is like a nervous suitor who stands on the doorstep of profundity, poises his knuckles to rap on the door, and then, after several long seconds of silence, walks away without having knocked.

Richard Powers is a gifted writer, a rather unusual measure of that are the reviews that people write about his work. With the usual exception, those that read his work take what he has written, and integrate it in to their own ideas. His books are not just entertainment. Another reviewer suggested the Author allows for this ambiguity in his writing, he allows the reader the freedom of opinion on outcome, the ability to make a choice. The primary subject he presents in this work is one that will continue to grow from theory, until it forces fundamental beliefs to be questioned, and bring out the most Fundamentalist of Luddites, and with them debate that will carry the potential for disruption, or worse, violence.

Mr. Powers has a talent for writing about arcana and making the subjects accessible. Unlike many reviewers, my knowledge of the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence is strictly that of an amateur. I found that Mr. Powers brought credibility to a theme that has been little more than bad Science Fiction in the hands of other Authors. He included all the tech-talk, but he used language in its most basic forms to first make the project appear possible, to bringing the true enormity of what will be required before anything akin to sentience can be achieved/created.

The written words, when he collected them into novel form, also became the deciding factor in his initial carbon-based personal relationship. When silicon took the place of carbon the importance of language was increased exponentially. Neither relationship was fruitful.

One reviewer queried that when we finished the book did the experience stop or is it continuing even now. If you have never read this Author, what I write might suggest I have a form of dementia. I admit that before I read "Plowing The Dark" I thought other reviewers were there, way, way, out there.

Mr. Powers is the perfect novelist, for when you are immersed in his work he suspends disbelief faultlessly. He does not intrude, and he does not preach. Making the decision to read his work is a bit like what Neo faced, the red pill, or the blue? Once you start with the first book, you cannot stop reading until he stops writing.

Without question, Richard Powers is my favorite living author - and reading this intricately crafted, Byzantine book only served to buttress my conviction that Fiction is yet endowed with the capacity to be a vital, compelling art form. Powers has an uncanny ability "to delight and instruct," and in Galatea this is evidenced by his musings on the moebius-twisted attempts of consciousness to unravel its own hidden workings (see pages 28, 218, and 276). He very effectively interweaves his Pygmalion story with a narrative built around an artificial intelligence (I'd wager that he's been greatly influenced by Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach - one of my personal favorites), and, as in Gold Bug Variations, populates his tale with complex, well-educated characters who lead ambiguous, interesting lives. In casting himself as the book's protagonist, Powers alternately comes across as a self-indulgent and a self-effacing writer; however, this works in giving the reader a glimpse into an Aphrodite-molded imagination. I read this novel after I read Gain, his latest, and was more impressed with Galatea's plot and characters. His trademark shimmering wordplay (I find it refreshing that he allows his readers to make their own associations, connections, and conclusions through this device) is in abundance here. All in all, a bracing read!

I am highly recommending Galatea 2.2, the newest book from the author Richard Powers. Powers writes dense books with multiple story lines that wrap themselves around each other like a double helix. Typically, his books weave these two stories (usually featuring different points in time) into a fascinating tapestry that holds the reader's interest until the very last page. Galatea 2.2 is no different. In this book, Powers relates a partially autobiographical story of his life and love from college through the writing of his first four books, with the story of his involvement in teaching a neural network based computer how to learn -- a kind of Pygmalion story for the 90s (hence the name Galatea -- she was the sculpture of a maiden created by Pygmalion and subsequently brought to life by Aphrodite).

Like Powers' other books, this one features lush, beautiful language and imagery. The book is bittersweet in that it relates both the tale of a love that finally broke down and the tale of trying to build something from nothing.

For fans of Powers' previous books, this one provides enlightenment into the frame of mind and life of the author when he was writing his previous books. For those who were not fans of Powers before, Galatea provides a window to those earlier works which should encourage readers to seek out the other works.

Galatea 2.2 was a recent nominee for the National Book Awards, garnering Powers a second nomination. He is also a past recipient of one of the McArthur genius grants.

I could hardly put this book down...and yet, I didn't want it to end. It leaves me wanting for another of his books.

Richard Powers is my favorite contemporary novelist and this book is easily one of his best. For their combination of intelligence and emotional complexity, his books have no rivals. In Galatea 2.2. I was once again immersed in a world rich with ideas and human desire, a world where the emotional rawness of C. and the philosophical curiosity of the neural network Helen illustrate the vast range of our age-old need for understanding. In the end, this novel illuminates not only the power of narrative, but our absolute need for it. It reminds us how greatly we depend on stories to understand the world, and to understand ourselves. The narrator Richard's best shot at explaining the world to Helen is by sharing the story of his own life -- the one true story he really knows. Powers suggests that our most intimate stories are carried through life as beautiful burdens -- narratives with the power to haunt, but ultimately save us. This book, like all of Powers' novels, will move you and inspire you. It's a hard one to shake from your mind.

I wish I could join my fellow readers' joy and delight in GALATEA 2.2, but all I could find was a fascinating story ruined by authorial displays of self-conciousness. It's bad enough that the book is written by one "Richard Powers" who suspiciously has a past similar to the author's. But the annoying and self-indulgent pattern of calling characters by single initials (C. for the lover) and of naming obivious locations by initials (B for Boston and U. for Urbana, Illinois) only serves to distance the reader from Powers' work. Are we supposed to take his story seriously, or as some kind of fable he's constructed from his true past? Is there something wrong with calling a town and town?

I found his characters fascinating, but best being Artificial Intelligence expert Lentz, a barely human creature who turns out to have a heart of sheer beauty. Others display the human foibles we all love. But C. is a sheer bore and the love story between her and the self-important "Powers" made me want to skip whole sections of the book.

There are far too many authors today determined to prove that they can improve on the simple act of telling a good story. Powers falls into the trap of trying to distance us, create a myth instead of an all-out fictional tale, turn machines into objects of love and desire.

The book has wonderful moments of mood and description, but the main character's disturbing ennui and the pathetic non-ending, made me sorry I even spent the time on this novel. Three stars for the writing. A big goose-egg for the tale.

A friend recommended one of Power's novels just as the New York Times piece about him came out, and I was intrigued: another "cerebral" writer, à la Calvino, Borges, Nabokov? I've also been tremendously interested in AI--but the novel was disappointing: the actual writing is strained and even pretentious at times, while the narrative never becomes engaging. He works with big, interesting ideas, but they don't seem to result in big (or even small) interesting novels.

Richard Powers' "Galatea 2.2" isn't a novel you pick up and zip through in a couple of days. It's laden with so many weighty ideas and written in such cleverly precise and economical prose you need the patience to plough through it slowly to get its meaning. This may or may not be a put off depending on why you read fiction in the first place. For the uninitiated, the proliferation of dense techno jargo does slow down the reading somewhat but you persist because the novel's richly textured human interest is so palpably warm in its emotional resonance you don't want to give up. The love story aside, the protagonist's abandonment of a prospective career in science for literature and the devastating impact of his decision on his father is simply heartbreaking. It is also the fodder which feeds his return to U. Equally touching is witnessing how single mother Diana (Powers' colleague) courageously copes with bringing up two kids, one a near genius and the other a retard. He learnt so much from her. Finally, the experiment with building Helen, a thinking machine capable of passing the English exams, dubbed the Pygmalion experiment by critics, reveals the manifest danger of letting science assume the driver's seat. Galatea 2.2 is such a complex novel readers will almost certainly finish the last page with different ideas and conclusions of their own.

A magnificent book. I have loved all of Richard Power's books, and this is no exception. His writing is superb on several levels, and I'd like to mention just 2 of them. First of all, he is not afraid of feeling. Many young writers display his verbal virtuousity, but he is one of the only to indulge in true, heartfelt, unadulterated emotion. He is not ashamed to feel for his characters, even as an omnipotent storyteller (which he is in this book). The emotional makeup of a person seems to be his beacon in navigating his protagonists' lives and times. Second, he certainly manages to teach us and delight us simultaneously. This is a problematic genre, because most times these two goals come to blows somewhere in the book. I think this is because the authors usually begin to write (About science, music etc.) with set opinions. They want to transfer knowledge. Powers does not do this. He is immensely knowledgable on almost everything, but never does he force his opinions on us. He questions, sharing with us the basic premises leading him to these questions, and thus truly teaches and illuminates. His quests keave us no option but to join, making us better persons at their end. He has no answers, only the ever-continuing process of learning and questioning. I hope he continues this quest for a long time. Buy this book.