Customer Reviews

Gold Bug Variations

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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!

This is a wonderful book. It interleaves scientific and musical themes with parallel love stories, and it manages to make the various thematic elements comments back and forth on each other. It builds slowly to a bittersweet and very moving ending.

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.

Let me start out by saying I am not a big fan of Richard Powers writing -- I don't dig the exceedingly self-conscious stories he crafts. But I had a much bigger problem with Gold Bug Variations than just the style. Did anyone else seem to think that the "brilliant" revelations in this book were lifted from the classic text on Artifical Intelligence (and Intelligence and a whole lot of other things) by Douglas Hofstadter "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"? The connection between coding and the interplay between molecular genetics and Bach and life in general was made long before (and far better and more wide-ranging) by Hofstadter. I could not get beyond the similarities between the two books, and feel that Powers diminished the power of Hofstadter's arguments.

So if any of you enjoyed that aspect of Gold Bug Variations (which I found to still be the most interesting part) then definitely read "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". It is a much more challenging, but also much more rewarding book.

A difficult, challenging book, but far more enjoyable and farm more profound than the Pynchon you might read instead. To start with it, it has characters and plot that are very interesting, in addition to the intellectual architecture that makes it profound.

If you haven't read Powers before, don't start with this. It's too hard. Read Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance or Operation Wandering Soul to begin. Then, after you're totally addicted to Powers, move on to this, the best of the bunch, and the most rewarding.

A brilliant novel about love, science, music, and the complexity of the human condition. Powers explores our impulse to unravel the mysteries around us (whether cracking the genetic code or excavating the narrative of the enigmatic Dr. Ressler) and our unrelenting impulse towards expression: artistic, verbal, and yes, physical. I'm in full agreement with the reader from Ohio: this is a passionate book. The characters are full-bodied, complex, and driven by a wide spectrum of desires, including love for eachother and for their intellectual pursuits. The prose is amazing, so keep a pen handy while you read if you're in the habit of marking passages you like.

One of the joys of reading fiction is in the people you meet on the way. The truly great books have you almost grieving for the characters to whom you must say goodbye as you close the book. So it is with The Gold Bug Variations - I miss Ressler too.

You'll read the prose that approaches poetry, the virtuosity, the contrapuntal style (not contrapunctal, as one reviewer put it), and the breadth of subject material. All of these delight and dazzle, but with Ressler, Powers reaches the heart.

The best of Powers' works to date, "Gold Bug Variations" is exhaustively structured, exhaustively researched, and exhaustively detailed -- but well worth your investment of time.

One thing I would add to the multitude of opinions already expressed here: "Gold Bug" provides some of the best layman's explanations of genetic theory and Darwinian theory I've ever read. Do you think the rigorous pursuit of scientific fact is cold or heartless or inhuman? You won't after reading Mr. Powers' work.

A good companion book for those interested in the Darwinian/genetic aspect would be Robert Wright's excellent survey of evolutionary psychology, "The Moral Animal."

What can I say? I was transported by this book. I marvel at the complexity of its design. At the poetry of its prose (I actually reformatted a passage as poetry, sent it to a friend and she wrote back agog, asking who the poet was; I was tempted to take the credit myself but honesty prevailed). At the theme of human love and its costs and benefits. This is a book to dip into, after you've read it the first time, to savor. But I do go on!

This book was at the top of my AlexLit recommendation list, and I have to admit that Hypatia hit a home run with this book. It took me a long time to finish, mostly due to never being able to give it all of my attention, instead having to catch a chapter here and there when I could amongst all the moving plans, preparations, and actual occurrence. While reading it, I could not help myself from remarking to several people how it was the best science fiction book I had read in 10 years.

The book is two stories: the first is that of Jan O'Deigh, a reference librarian at a branch in New York City who finds herself caught up by Franklin Todd in discovering just who is this mysterious Dr. Stuart Ressler, whom Todd works with on the graveyard shift for a computer processing firm. The other story is that of Stuart Ressler, a young PhD who sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code and falls in love with a member of his research team. The two stories are quickly revealed as love stories--but not just sexual love between the two couples, but an extended love of discovery, of knowledge, and of friendship.

"Science Fiction?" you ask. This sounds like one of those mainstream literature books that's all about adultery and real life. It all depends on how you define science fiction. I've been accused by Jill that I'm the worst hypocrite when it comes to defining science fiction by limited it to what I like. For example, I despise David Brin's The Postman so much that I refuse to call it science fiction. To me, The Postman is a warmed over western, and not even a very good western at that. I was not surprised that Kevin Costner wanted to film that book--its politically jingoistic nature and focus on the strong individual overcoming all was just the kind of role that he would have written for himself, and often does. The background to The Postman may imply science fiction for those who let anything about a possible future be defined as such, but I maintain that science fiction is fiction that contains a strong element of science to it. The Postman is a fantasy, albeit [1] a depressing, end-of-the-world sort.

Which brings me back to the book at hand, which is so consumed with science that it nearly overloads the reader. The Gold Bug Variations is not set in the future, though, and that's why most people would question its SF credentials. Instead, it is set in the most recent past--the present of when it was published. A reader that comes to The Gold Bug Variations without a scientific back- ground, or at least some basic knowledge of genetics, will soon find themselves drowning within the terms that infuse the book, but it works because the viewpoint character is a reference librarian who has fallen deeply for a geneticist. There are constant references to cracking the code of the central mystery, items occurring in genus and phyla.

Even beyond my personal definition of science fiction, it even matches that broader definition of SF as fiction about worlds that are not. In the end of this book, an action occurs using ATM and other financial devices that did not occur (and I question whether it could ever have occurred) in our world. For the book at hand, it is believable, a strong evidence for a writer creating a self- consistent world-view.

This is all beside the point that I really want to make, and that this is simply the best book I've read since I finished A.S. Byatt's Possession, discussed long ago in Installment #7, I think. I still remember the thrill of ending Byatt's novel, of the hair of my arms sticking up in a static reaction because of how everything in the book just came out "right." How I kept reading slower and slower, trying to make Byatt's world last just a moment longer, trying to delay arriving at that last word. Powers' novel affected me differently, but just as powerfully. I picked it up one night around 8pm. I was around page 400, I recall, and started reading, and kept reading, and continued reading. I knew it was getting late, but I could not stop; I needed to finish this book. I was propped up in bed, Jill fast asleep beside me as I sped through the pages. I had to know what happened to these people. As the end got nearer and nearer, tears rolled down my cheeks. I had gotten to know these people so well in 600+ pages that I was entirely sympathetic to their agony and joy. That's powerful stuff, folk.

I can not recommend this book too highly. It shares a lot of my feelings about literature--that it can be intellectually rewarding and emotive at the same time, that it need not be an adventure to be engaging, that it be about individuals and about the world. I need to find out if Powers' other novels achieve this same intensity, but I guess it will have to wait until I have the time to read the rest of Byatt's oeuvre as well.