Gold Bug Variations (Paperback)

by Richard Powers (Author) "Word came today: four lines squeezed on a three-by-five..." (more)
Key Phrases: home nature museum, codon assignments, coding problem, Uncle Jimmy, Question Board, Reference Desk (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Powers ( Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance ; Prisoner's Dilemma ) is a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant , and it seems appropriate: this strange, overwritten, often infuriating, manically intelligent and sometimes deeply moving novel could hardly have been produced by a writer of mere talent. Powers has woven an extraordinary knowledge of music, of science (particularly of the search for genetic coding, and of computer programming), of the mysteries of language and art history, into a saga that is dazzling and wearying in almost equal measure. The novel jumps back and forth between the late '50s, when brilliant scientist Stuart Ressler is involved with an Illinois research team trying to break the mysteries of DNA coding, and the '80s, when librarian Jan O'Deigh and computer programmer Franklin Todd get to know Ressler, now holding an insignificant night job at a massive computer database operation in Brooklyn, N.Y., and try to figure what derailed his promising career. Not a great deal happens, in a conventional narrative sense. Ressler has an affair with one married fellow scientist and learns music from another; his scientific career is, in fact, aborted by his resulting passion for music. O'Deigh leaves her glib Madison Avenue boyfriend, takes up with Todd and is then abandoned by him in his vain search for information about an obscure 16th-century Flemish artist. Toward the end the three principals are involved in a massive computer scam to help a stricken colleague. Despite occasional bewilderment at arid patches of scientific jargon and interminable displays of arcane knowledge for its own sake, a reader persists with The Gold Bug Variations (the title, obviously, is a play on Bach's Goldberg Variations , which have a key role in the book's intellectual structure, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug , about the solving of a puzzle). For there is a perpetual air of surprise about the book, of intellectual excitement, a passionate involvement with words that expands into delightfully witty dialogue and profoundly evocative description. Reading it is hard work, but it's also deeply enriching; the decade is not likely to bring another novel half as challenging and original.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
If you don't get the title's allusive pun (to Robbins's Goldberg Variations), you won't get far into this long, densely textured, multi-referential, and brilliant novel. It demands that a reader make connections between such diversities as the genetic code and musical notation, Flemish art and biological nomenclature, the logic of computer systems and the Dewey decimal classification, cartography and chemistry. Making such connections--deciphering the encrypted messages of our world--is the great single quest in this novel of multiple searches. There is a rudimentary plot: a pair of love stories, separated by 25 years, entwined one round the other, but the real story here, its great treasure hunt, is the search to break the code unlocking the secret of life. This won't be one of the summer's hottest best sellers, but it is one of the year's best books, a grand encyclopedic novel akin to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge . A previous novel by Powers, Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance ( LJ 9/15/85), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 31, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060975008
• ISBN-13: 978-0060975005
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #427,798 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powers is worth the intellectual effort involved., September 9, 1999

By A Customer

This is one of my favorite novels, by one of my favorite authors. It reminded me of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which had a great deal of influence on me in my adolescence. Both were "about" so many different subjects that one was inspired to explore further afterwards. Powers consistently whets my appetite for new subjects. Gold Bug Variations is the perfect example. How extaordinary to read a novel that compells one to run off and gather research material quite joyfully. I dug out my collection of Edgar Allan Poe, for Tale of the Gold Bug and borrowed a friend's Gould version of the Goldberg Variations. I dug out an encyclopedia to read about the days of early DNA research. I didn't have time last year to do the Art History reseach, but hope to reread the novel soon with that material at hand. And, a thousand blessings on Powers' head for allowing his wonderful heroine librarian to be so sexy, headstrong and brilliant. In other words, for portraying us just as we are. "Gas station attendant of the mind" indeed.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powers is our Mann., May 10, 2001

By	AllOverWith "cannes2000" (L.A.) - See all my reviews

Richard Powers' books fly in the face of what I've always thought literature should be. His prose lopes along with the ungainliness of a Zimbabwean basketball giant off the court, he almost never finds le mot juste, no matter how long his books are, and his characters communicate with metaphors drawn from the deep-end of numbers theory and astrophysics, including the children, giving the impression that this man is critically cloistered. Sometimes, Powers doesn't even seem like an artist at all -- his books are almost completely void of sensual appeal, poetic imagery, and charm. Whenever a character in Gold Bug tells a joke, it's invariably so awful that Powers has to explain afterwards how everyone couldn't keep from laughing, proving he's as detached from the human animal's need for humor as he is from the various processes of cell division -- he understands how other authors use it to lighten the load of their material, and tries to do the same, yet invariably comes off like an anthropomorphic robot in a feel-good Hollywood film who, when asked to define love, spits out, "The rush of hormones resulting from the biological imperative to reproduce." Still, for better or worse, any serious reader has to admit that Powers also has the monopoly on American fiction, turning out three books in the last decade -- Gain, Galatea 2.2, and this one -- that tower over the unfocused page-piles of his fellow academics.

In other words, one must learn to love Powers despite himself. Almost everyone I recommend his books to gives up after half a day of reading, unwilling to sift through the traffic-jammed prose -- "Snow obliterated paths, spun power lines into flax, confected hedgerows, dressed our cabin in buttressed gothics and finials," is a typical try-too-hard example, proving that Powers, like Shakespeare, never blots a line. But his klutziness, somehow, is a proof of his sincerity, and so is his heroic effort not to allow unlimited knowledge to make him bitter. He trots out a quote at the end of the novel, the source unknown to me, that sums up his ethos perfectly: "For who would lose / Though full of pain / This intellectual being." Even before reading that quote, Powers had forced me ask myself repeatedly whether understanding was a curse, and if it might not be better to stop writing once and for all and go work in a pizza parlor. But thankfully, Powers is as insightful about the prospect of hope as he is about the moments of despair. This is a man who can squash you with an all-too-convincing treatise on how there is no evolution, only random "quick fixes" of mishandled genetic material, then restore your faith in mankind with a mini-essay on Bach that proves beyond a shadow a doubt that he was the agent of some kind of divine power. The very ORDER of Powers' books, the mindboggling synthesis of disparate concepts, is an almost religious attempt to prove the universe operates according to consistent, logical, invisible laws. Gold Bug dotes on Bach, but Powers is more of a Bruckner, a fabricator of gawky but heaven-scraping, exhausting but cathartic symphonies.

For the novice: Start with Galatea 2.2, then move on to Gain, and finally Gold Bug. Those two later books are much more controlled, less digressive, flaunting a vast improvement in technique -- but Gold Bug is at the heart of his output. It's almost like the world's most brilliant diary, in a way.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bach, Darwin, Watson and Crick: An uncommon thread, July 1, 2000

By	Steven J. Bissell (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'd known about this book, but as a biologist, I had my doubts about a "mere" novelist being able to weave genetics, evolution, music, love, and who-knows-what-all into an interesting story. I bought it because it is "recommended" and I was going through one of those phases. I've never been more favorable impressed. I don't 'dog-ear' novels very often, but I did this one. Time and again Powers manages to make sense and beauty out of the dry matter of amino acids. If you want to know about the recent mapping of the human genome and what the personal and cultural implications of this leap forward are, I can do no better than to recommend this book.

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!