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Summer Reading
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Powers weaves two (at least) stories together in a manner which left me wanting more and more. This is a big hefty book and, to my mind, only about half as long as I would have liked it to be. I was caught up in both stories and spend hours looking up the references to make sure the author "had it right." He does, on all levels. Read this book!
The main narrator is Jan O'Deigh, a research librarian in Brooklyn. The book opens with her receiving a postcard from her estranged boyfriend, Franklin Todd, telling her that their mutual friend, the mysterious ex-scientist Stuart Ressler, has just died of cancer. Frank leaves no forwarding address -- he seems to be wandering around Europe, still in pursuit of his long delayed dissertation on an obscure Flemish painter. Jan immediately quits her job, and spends the next year researching genetics (Dr. Ressler's specialty), and trying to find Franker, while telling us the story of her relationship with the two men. This is interleaved with the story of Dr. Ressler's year at the University of Illinois in the late '50s, a year spent as part of a team trying to unravel the genetic code.
The novel is a web of searches. Jan meets Todd when he asks her to research Dr. Ressler, who had been nearly famous once but had dropped completely out of sight. Dr. Ressler, of course, is decoding the most central code in life back in 1957. In the present day, Ressler and Todd work at a data processing facility, and they eventually need to search through the data they process to help a coworker. And Jan spends a year searching for Franklin, searching for meaning in her life, searching for what made Stuart Ressler tick. All of this is overlayed with descriptions of music, particularly Bach's great Goldberg Variations, a dizzyingly brilliant set of 32 permutations of a simple French tune of 4 notes -- permuations that in the book's central metaphor resemble the permutations of the four DNA bases that result in the entire genetic code for Earthly life.
Lest this seem dry (and it's not!), the book also tells of two agonizing love affairs: Dr. Ressler's affair with a married fellow researcher, and Jan's affair with Franklin. Both Ressler and Todd have a hard time deciding what is worthwhile if life, and that makes it hard for them to be loved, or to stay in love. And of course Ressler's love is married, and married to a good man. Furthermore Powers tangles these love affairs with more questions about genetics, and death, and procreation, and the way variety is created from simple beginnings.
This is an exhilarating book, an absorbing and fully involving read. It's wonderfully constructed, and elegantly written.