Galatea 2.2 – 4/5
This is a reread from when I was in grad school, so something close to 20 years. I’d first heard of this book and Richard Powers from a selection being anthologized in the Norton American lit. It’s a weird book to anthologize because of how cohesive the entirety of the book is and how dependent it is on context. But Richard Powers doesn’t really write short fiction and they must have wanted him in there. The book is not exactly semi-autobiographical, but like a lot of Richard Powers books, there’s a character named Richard Powers whose basic life biography is part of the plot of the book. Whether this is more like a Sophie’s Choice kind of thing where the young William Styron in the form of “Stingo” plays out a fictional set of events against a somewhat true backdrop or something much closer to Richard Powers’s actual story, you’d have to ask him.
Our narrator has returned to his alam mater, which is called U, and is modeled off of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he’s been hired to work with an AI development team to help feed cultural data via voice command. This means asking questions and attempting conversation, and also giving the AI poems, novels, essays, etc. The idea is to have the AI write a graduate comps exam in response to an essay prompt and use the resulting essay as a kind of Turing Test.
We also learn of Richard’s past with U, where he was a young grad student who fell in love with a student (it’s not so bad — he was 22, she 20 — and they didn’t end up together until long after she was in his class). Now years on the relationship is over (slightly recently) and the presence on campus has him flooded with memory. As you can imagine from the title of the book, the AI program becomes a somewhat conduit for his lost affection as he approaches middle age, but more so does the grad student who will go up against the machine. Hurt as he is, he misses how obviously flawed and problematic his transferred affection is, and hurt as he is, it’s somewhat understandable.
“I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look. I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness’s tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself. The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying. Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d’acqua. I’m eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water.”
The Time of Our Singing – 5/5
I think it would take 5000 or more words to really capture this book. For me, except maybe alongside The Overstory, this is the richest Richard Powers novel by far. It’s the longest as well, but it’s not that much longer than The Goldbug Variations, but has a kind of expansiveness while that book keeps turning inward and getting smaller. The subject matter of each plays into that heavily. The novel circulates a theory by one of the lead characters that all time spirals and happens at the same time and that we just so happen to be experiencing it linearly. With that in mind, it’s hard not to reshape the novel a little in describing it. A young Black woman and a somewhat older, but not much older German Jew meet at the famous Marian Anderson concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. The concert had been planned as a result of the DAR Constitution Hall shutting its doors to the Black Anderson, and who with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt put on the show. The two meet and seem to fall quickly in love and despite the wishes of her family get married and have children. The two sons they have Jonah and Joseph become musicians, Jonah a lieder-singer (a singer of classical music, but not opera) and Joseph first as a singer and eventually a pianist. They have a daughter, Ruth, who has musical talent but does not pursue it beyond use in her everyday life.
The novel is incredibly expansive as the two sons go off to conservatory, then Julliard, and to enter contests and give and receive private lessons. The novel takes place from about 1939-2005 or so (it’s told from about 2005 but maybe a little later depending on how you read some information) and is primarily narrated first by Joseph whose viewpoint as an outsider from his brother’s worldclass talent, his outsider to much of the music world, his outsider in his family, and his outsider to both and because of both his Black and Jewish halves — which add to his being, while restricting his place in America. A second narrator tells the story of the parents meeting and having a life together.
The novel follows the course of these lives, as well as, tracing the lives of Black Americans in the second half of the 20th century, sometimes directly in 3rd person narration separate from the novel, and sometimes in the brothers’ interaction in and outside American culture, and sometimes both.
It’s hard to say how much the novel dives into the “white writer working through Black characters” issue, but it’s certainly not zero, but it’s a book that certainly is seeking authenticity and honesty. And as true with all Richard Powers novels, there’s a lot of brain happening in this novel, and not true with all Richard Powers novels, there’s a significant amount of heart as well.
“Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.”