The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Understanding Richard Powers, by Joseph Dewey
reviewed by Luc Herman

Joseph Dewey. Understanding Richard Powers. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2002. 176 pp. $29.95.

In this excellent introduction to the work of Richard Powers, Joseph Dewey resolutely describes the author of The Gold Bug Variations and seven other “big novels of ideas” as being torn between two all-American impulses, “Emersonian engagement and Dickinsonesque withdrawal.” In what at first sight looks like a reductive effort to neatly structure the novels under scrutiny, Dewey assigns the odd-numbered books—Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and Galatea 2.2 (1995)—to engagement, and the even-numbered ones—Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), and Gain (1998)—to withdrawal. Powers’s seventh novel, Plowing the Dark (2000), then assumes the status of a “summary text,” combining the two inclinations with the contrapuntal refinement so typical of its author. Dewey’s great strength resides in his ability to make a convincing case for the dialectic development around which he has organized his book. Thus Dilemma contains a “counterargument” to Three Farmers by showing that an energetic imagination (as displayed and seemingly commended by Powers in the first novel) can lead to isolation, and Wandering Soul embodies a pessimistic vision that seems to undermine the “ascendant premise” of Gold Bug. Dewey is nicely informative about each novel and manages to provide encompassing readings. While his interpretation of Gold Bug perhaps does not meet the expectations raised by this extraordinary work, and while his rhetoric is occasionally overcome by his desire to prove the humanistic concerns at the root of Powers’s work, Dewey’s book is by far the best overview treatment around. If Powers was serious when he confirmed via E-mail Dewey’s view of Plowing as a capstone, Powers readers may be in for a real treat with The Time of Our Singing (2003).