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daja57 's review for:
The Gold Bug Variations
by Richard Powers
A librarian, Jan O'Deigh, and Franklin Todd, a computer technician, try to discover the story behind Frank's colleague, Stuart Ressler, who used to be a scientist on the cutting-edge of research into the mechanism by which DNA (its double helix structure recently discovered by Watson and Crick) controls genetic inheritance. As they learn about the Stuart's love affair, they themselves fall in love.
There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.
There are a lot of thematic correspondences:
The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.
It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)
Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.
It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.
And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!
This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.
Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.
There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.
There are a lot of thematic correspondences:
The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.
It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)
Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.
It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.
And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!
This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.
Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.