The Gold Bug Variations
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National Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years. “The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team. Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery: Why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.
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What do you get if you smash together information science, genetics, some Bach, some computer programming and a dash of cryptography? An intensely smart novel that only Richard Powers could write. Data retrieval, translation, pattern recognition and puzzle solving is all over this story, where librarians, system administrators, scientists and art historians mingle to create this double helix of love stories. Bach's Goldberg Variations are the red thread leading us through this partial mystery, and are also hidden in the structure of the story telling. As always with Powers the information content is high, but his protagonists and the plot still get front stage. Most of the time at least. Sometimes he goes off on inspired tangents on the nature of DNA and code and information at large, but these lengthy segments are too overloaded with wild associations and smart language riddles, that it's hard to follow. The first half of the book was easy, the second half a bit less.
