A Virtual Masterpiece. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Sept 8, 2000 by Valerie Sayers

Plowing the Dark
Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 415 pp.

Richard Powers is a novelist of the more-is-more school, a maximalist who interweaves seemingly disparate story lines, indulges in language jags, allows his characters to philosophize and to pontificate, puns shamelessly, displays the minutiae of his research, and juggles the big questions (suffering, reality, the meaning of existence). His seventh novel, Plowing the Dark, often appears to be aiming for a theory of everything, but it is also fully novelistic: as it ponders how humans create their own realities, it moves its characters through real time and real space, leaving them profoundly changed. It also glories in depicting the mundane, the quotidian, the physical.

And it is that physical depiction of reality that is at the heart of its concerns. The novel opens in 1990, as the world comes to terms with its emerging technological tools and toys. One of its plots (there are two distinct stories, presented in alternating sections) concerns the artist Adie Klarpol, who is recruited by an old college friend to work in a Seattle virtual-reality lab. Computer scientists there are creating fantastic 3-D spaces, simulations borrowed from real life (and real art). In the second story, Taimur Martin, an Iranian-American, is kidnapped in Beirut, where he has recently arrived to teach English. In captivity, struggling to stay alive and sane while chained to a radiator, he must deal with the horror of his own reality as he labors to fill his hours by making sense of his past. With Tiananmen Square, Tehran, and the Berlin Wall as its backdrops, the novel spreads itself across the globe, as if to emphasize its universality and the interdependence of humans everywhere.

Powers has made a specialty of this kind of two-part construction: his last novel, Gain, for instance, alternates the domestic story of a woman dying of cancer with a very theoretical "Story of American Commerce"; Galatea 2.2 follows its protagonist in the present, as he becomes involved in an artificial-intelligence program, and in the past as a crucial love affair unravels. In Plowing the Dark the two stories are separated stylistically by a device I found strangely artificial for a novel about artifice: the hostage's story is addressed to himself in the second person, an insistence on narrative distance that makes structural sense but feels forced, particularly as the novel opens. If I sound cranky, that may be because Powers's fictional worlds are so complex, so complete, that a reader begins to inhabit them, perhaps even to feel a little proprietary about them. Powers has plenty of annoying stylistic quirks: his characters speak in relentlessly arch dialogue; he cannot name one music composer or medicine or political problem without then listing twenty others; he can be a pedantic name-dropper on subjects like great art. Learning to live inside a Powers novel is learning to live with excess and mess, but his enthusiasms and energies are more than worth the strewn clothes and the crumbs on the counter. Plowing the Dark has a surfeit of intelligence, empathy, playful theory, serious philosophy, loving literary allusions and wit. (Besides, there are the puns, which are gloriously awful: my favorite here is the man describing his middle-aged sexual self: "the loin in winter").

Powers's use of a technological illiterate, Adie, allows him to explain, clearly and without condescension, how virtual reality works and to what uses it is being put. Adie functions as the outsider and innocent learning the political and moral implications of a technology that is capable of representing reality in (nearly) all its dimensions. She has already abandoned her painting; the not entirely convincing explanation is that she has embraced commercial art in order to get away from the commercialism of the gallery scene. The characters' statements about art--one says, "Art is not capable of teaching"--are didactic and heavy-handed, but Adie's creations allow for a much more expansive exploration of what it means to copy and to represent, what it means to live inside art. Adie begins her virtual reality experiments borrowing from paintings by Rousseau and van Gogh, and finally reproduces the interior of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the great basilica-turned-mosque.

The magnificent chapter describing Adie's final creation provides a stylistic and thematic link to the story of Taimur Martin, who, of course, also resides in the Mideast, where he has been imprisoned for years. After I overcame my initial distaste for the Martin narrative, I found myself simultaneously dreading and longing for his story to continue. The account of his incarceration is one of the bravest pieces of writing Powers has committed to paper; a reader who abides with Martin in his solitary cell will emerge spent and shaken. The emotional realities of Martin's isolation and Adie's moral crisis are set off and deepened, moreover, by the remarkable balance Powers strikes, ultimately, between structure and content. The motifs of both stories intersect and merge, the dark of two worlds plowed by meditations on what it means to be alone, to be abandoned, to abandon, to imagine and to represent God: "You turn in the entranceway of illusion, gaping down the airplane aisle, and you make it out. For God's sake, call it God. That's what we've called it forever, and it's so cheap, so self-promoting, to invent new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late a date."