Plowing the Dark: A Novel [Paperback]

Richard Powers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2001

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet, where the dual frames of this inventive novel to coalesce.

Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. As her ex-husband lies dying and the outbreak of computerized war fills her with a sense of guilty complicity, Adie is thrown deeper into building a place of beauty and unknown power, were she might fend off the incursions of the real world gone wrong.

On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher retreating from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. Without distraction or hope of release, he must keep himself whole by the force of his memory alone. Each infinite, empty day moves him closer to insanity, and only the surprising arrival of sanctuary sustains him for the shattering conclusion. Plowing the Dark is fiction that explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

No one who enjoyed Richard Powers's remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern." TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that

their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.

Powers's lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A groundbreaking literary novelist and MacArthur "genius" grant winner, Powers (Galatea 2.2; Gain; The Gold Bug Variations) takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art in his ambitious and dazzling seventh book. Like most of Powers's previous works, this novel weaves together two sets of characters. One comprises artists and programmers at the Cavern, a pioneering virtual-reality project sponsored by a Microsoftesque company. As college students in the early 1970s, painter Adie Klarpol, writer Steve Spiegel and composer Ted Zimmerman shared a house, an art scene, a complex erotic entanglement and a sense of limitless potential. When the novel opens, it's the mid-'80s, and Steve is a programmer: he convinces Adie to flee New York City and commercial art for Washington State and the Cavern. We follow Adie as she learns about new media and about her new, multiethnic colleagues, each with his or her own emotional problems. As Adie and Steve rediscover high art and each other, both must return to the charismatic Ted and his painful fate. Powers's other plot concerns Taimur Martin, an American teacher taken hostage in Beirut. Taimur spends most of the novel in captivity, thrown back on memory and imagination: his harrowing second-person narration transforms outward monotony into inward drama, building up to some of Powers's best writing to date. Powers's fans love his gorgeous, allusive (if sometimes florid) prose, and his digressions into the sciences; both features, largely missing from Gain, re-emerge here to spectacular effect. Taimur's life and Adie's link up only thematically--they never meet; instead, Powers's dramatic prose and his intellectual reach makes their symbolic connection more than enough to propel the novel toward its moving close. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 415 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (August 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312280122
• ISBN-13: 978-0312280123
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #657,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A cracking good tale in crackling prose, June 17, 2000

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Plowing the Dark: A Novel (Hardcover)

"This room is never anything o'clock." That's the first line of this marvelous tale about two rooms a world apart--a virtual reality lab in Seattle and the room in Beirut where a man is held in solitary confinement by fundamentalist terrorists. What ties those two rooms together is the power of imagination both to destroy and to save. Powers manages to create a forward-rushing tale using such poetic language that one has to force oneself to slow down and savor his slightly quirky but always evocative prose. Two passages picked literally at random (I closed my eyes and pointed my finger) from page 11: "They drove out to his lair in the silence of small talk." "She did well around black. She understood it: one of the big two, not a true color, yet fraternizing with the deepest maroons, hoping to smuggle itself back over hue's closely guarded border."

Powers is one of that group of young American writers who are so imaginative, so stylish, so knowing that their prose snaps like a flag in a gale. Yet he's not a smart aleck like some of the others. You care about his characters. You care "how it turns out."

His previous novel, "Gain", seemed a bit flaccid to me. In "Plowing the Dark" he's back in top form.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a stunner, June 7, 2000

By 

Nicole (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plowing the Dark: A Novel (Hardcover)

An extraordinary novel full of the clash of light and dark. Two people in two separate and very different rooms: one is a solitary hostage in Lebanon, who fills his room with memories and the wanderings of his mind: the other is in Seattle designing a virtual reality room, filled with colour, making 'real' the creations of her imagination. Though their experiences couldn't be more different they share a great deal, not least their discovery of the way war and the needs of the militant can intrude on so-called ordinary life. I found myself thinking about this book long after I put it down - wonderful stuff.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous, Stunning, June 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Plowing the Dark: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book just swept me away. Richard Powers is one of my favorite writers of all time and Plowing the Dark shows Powers in prime form. Like his other novels, this one is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally rich. And yet -- how does he do it? -- this book is an absolute orginal! It provides all the expected pleasures of a Powers novel, yet it reminds me of nothing I've ever read before (by Powers or any other writer). Plowing is an absorbing story told in gorgeous prose. A must read!