Customer Reviews

Operation Wandering Soul

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This is the third book by Mr. Powers I have read recently, the options I have at this point are to either, let my mind heal before starting another of his works, or read only a few pages a day. I cannot begin to imagine where he harvests these ideas, or by what type of neural net hat trick he uses to store them, so they can be recalled in the sequencing he desires. He must remember everything his five senses have ever identified without any detail filtered, none at all.

The menagerie that is his Pediatric Ward, the holding pen for the "Pedes" makes George Lucas's Cantina at Mos Eisley look like the local coffee shop. And while there is no music there is "the Rapparition" who not only rhymes but also when he moves, he, "concocts this elaborate triple-level, supersyncopated, free-falling gymnastic routine". And that's about as slow and mellow as this book ever gets.

This is the most emotional book of his I have read. Previous works held the possibility of futures that were none too pleasant, and pasts that may have stung, but this time the tale is in real time. The assault is constant, no quarter given. The Pied Piper of Hamelin fame makes his appearance, but compared to the hopelessness that Dr. Kraft presides over, the Piper is Opera Buffa, comedic relief. The 13th century tale of terror first becomes a light story, and then a play with the real world's broken children of Angel City playing their fictional counterparts. No method acting just be your broken self.

Richard Powers portrays a world that deserves nothing but condemnation. A world where the Children would be better off were they lead away rather than live the lives they have. Adults have done nothing but inflict damage, including our 5th year resident Dr. Kraft.

He supplies this book with questions for further study at the end of a chapter, and then a literal word-by-word definition of the story of Peter Pan. And yes you guessed it, a child whose body is ten times its age in appearance while maintaining the age appropriate size. A girl named Joy who never experiences the feeling as she is gradually taken apart.

This is as about as up close and personal to a Richard Powers nightmare as this reader would like to get. I have no claim on a particularly vivid imagination, but the Author drills down so vividly he could disturb the victim of a coma.

A unique Author with a very unique mind.

Gold Bug may be Richard Powers' most accomplished and dazzling novel, but for sheer depth of feeling and emotional wallop, Operation Wandering Soul is unequalled. Told with the author's usual technical brilliance and command of novelistic structure, Wandering Soul distinguishes itself in the way Powers' command of language turns into devastatingly effective passages that you don't so much read as feel. The chapter introducing Joy is absolutely heartbreaking, and the novel's conclusion is stunning, one of the top passages of sustained emotional intensity of the last few decades, in my opinion. Richard Powers is a novelist with both heart and head; Operation Wandering Soul has both in abundance.

Powers took a lot of criticizm in '93 for this book, and it doesn't take long to figure out why. The plotline, setting, and flow are muddled, at best. But these things, for a change, aren't central to the book. The book is a quest, and if the brilliant _Goldbug Variations_ represented Power's search for Moonlight in a Chamber, then it could be said that _Wandering Soul_ searches for any sort of light at all.

That light is found in the children Power's characterizes. After reading _Galatea 2.2_, one understands the massive emotional stress Powers was under, (probably a good reason for the bleakness), and Powers seems to want to reclaim his childhood, only to realize he can't. Bipass the stumbling story connectors and non-present plot explanations, and view the child within you trapped in a world it cannot survive. Powers may yet be the most passionate writer in the world, feel it here, if you dare.

The more I read of Powers' work, the more I believe that he is a writer people will be studying a century from now. While I don't think this novel is quite as good as Plowing the Dark, it is still better than most contemporary novels I read by several orders of magnitude.

The plot follows a doctor named Kraft who is in rotations and serving as a surgeon in a children's ward in a poor section of Los Angeles. Most of the action concerns him and his interactions with Linda--a physical therapist and his love interest--and several patients, including mostly Joy Stepaneevong, a refugee on whom he operates. Kraft is as mentally wounded as his patients are physically, and is near a breakdown through most of the novel. His psychological situation is partly explained by his surroundings and partly by extended flashbacks into his childhood. He was raised in several different countries where his father was apparently part of raising instabilities for the U.S. government. As a result, Kraft has almost no sense of connectedness to anything. Amid all this, Powers weaves allusions to virtually every story involving children--from historical events like the Children's Crusade and the evacuation of London to fictional works like Peter Pan and the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Stylistically, Powers writes lush, vivid prose. If your ideal prose writer is Hemingway, with his spare and well-honed sentences, then Powers isn't for you. He is more like John Barth or even Sir Philip Sidney than plain style authors. Here's a representative passage, in which Powers describes Kraft and how someone who likes post-modern fiction has latched on to him:

Something about him must emanate this Mr. Potato Head plasticity. Chief of Surgery Burgess, dying a slow, half-century death in this city where reading span is sorely stretched by the instructions on microwave popcorn, instantly imagines that in Kraft he has found a kindred literate spirit, a simile son. Dr. Purgative, as Plummer rechristens him, keeps farming out these convoluted, epistemological novels by Kraft's obscure, young contemporaries. Plow through and report on, over sherry this afternoon, a postmodernist mystery thicker than the Index Medicus where the butler kills the author and kidnaps the narration. Damn thing includes its own explanatory Cliffs Notes halfway through, although the gloss is even more opaque than the story...

That combination of stylistic virtuosity and dead-on humor is Powers' signature, and to my mind he writes this brand of fiction as well or better than anyone writing today.

Richard Powers: Operation Wandering Soul (1993) 7/15/07



This is one hell of a novel, not surprisingly a National Book Award Finalist. And hellish it is too, for it depicts the inner (and outer) life of surgeon Richard Kraft as he works day and night in the emergency ward of an inner-city hospital within Los Angeles. From time to time he makes humane contact with therapist Linda Espera, too bedraggled a mutual experience to be called love (carnal or otherwise).

Of course their names carry symbolism. The author's namesake by translation represents the quick surgical fix, and at worst the "surgical strike" we hear about in the world news concerning our military conquests to spread our notion of civilization abroad. And Linda does represent some humanoid hope, which is also embodied by a dying little patient named Joy, a boat girl maimed by us saviors somewhere around Cambodia and somehow spirited here with her hopelessly anxious parents.

In the course of this novel, and through its amazingly skillful use of language, we become more deeply aware, not only of folkloristic tales and actual history concerning the victimization of innocent children through the ages (the Pied Piper, the Children's Crusade, etc.), but of how this has continued during our own lives - both abroad (with our help) and here at home, where we dare not look. Through magisterial story telling, all this failure of our flawed human experiment is interwoven with retold biographical reminiscences of the aforementioned protagonists of this deeply saddening reenactment of imagination and hope against a tide bigger than all of us.

Extremely talented writers walk a fine line between loyalty to plot and characters and inspired word play. No one who reads this novel can deny Mr. Powers's intelligence or his talent. Nimble phrases and clever insights fairly lift off every page. However, this novel seems to be more about writing than about the characters cast adrift in the miasma of modern life. What might have been a satisfying mix of emotional engagement and brilliant writing remained an intellectual exercise for this reader. Impressive? Yes. Engaging? Unfortunately, no.

In his next, semi-autobiographical novel, Powers' persona says that "[Opereation Wandering Soul] was fast becoming a bleak, baroque fairy tale about wandering and disappearing children." A few pages later he describes mailing in the MS and wonders, "who in their right mind would want to read an ornate, suffocating allegory about dying pedes at the end of history." We all should. Operation Wandering Soul is one of Powers' most powerful novels, both for its representation of those lost and wandering children and for a gut-wrenching portrayal of the emotional collapse of Dr. Richard Kraft, the central adult character. His title comes from the Vietnam War. Google it to see the relevance to Powers' novel.

A novel about caring and its consequences, Richard Powers explores the meaning of childhood and its innocence, in this moving novel about children and their stories. It should be required reading for anyone considering adulthood and the rearing of children

A book that made me look at the world differently. Transforming. I think Children are more precious, more vulnerable, and yet more sturdy than ever before. I read the world as a harsher place with stronger people in it than I did before. A vivid, racking, and ennobling book.

The wandering soul is a floater resident in pediatric surgery, but in a book by Richard Powers he is so much more. He is metaphysician, but sleepless, overworked, seemingly burdened with hopeless tasks. In only a month Richard Kraft has acquired a persona. A persona can vary greatly from service to service. He does not tell the head of surgery that this career is merely a career holding pattern for him.

In pediatric surgery themes of child rescue predominate. The author veers off to recount sending young London children off to Canterbury at the time of the blitz. The story then returns to the charity hospital in the City of Angels where a therapist called Linda is encountered by Kraft and a [...]Asian girl requiring foot surgery. Every child who shuffles up the ramp to the therapist is, it would seem, a shattered hierarchy.

Kraft knows how he will end up, the misanthrope volunteer. He played the horn and was studying music in college until one day he withdrew to return later to study science in preparation for medical school. A prematurely aged child, Nico, manages to organize the children to the extent that everyone goes out to a ball game, and everyone goes out to go dancing.

Interspersed with current affairs are other stories from the past such as the children's crusade and the piper of Hamelin. Children's books such as PETER PAN and THE SECRET GARDEN are scissored into the plot. The childhood of Kraft himself, called Ricky in the tale, finds a place in this work. Ricky was the child of presumably someone who worked in intelligence. Intelligence work, those off the wall assignments, would probably account for the fact that Ricky and his father and his mother moved frequently throughout his childhood. One scene is set in an American school in Vietnam.

Five stars to Richard Powers for this strange work. It bears rereading.