The few negative reviews for this book suggest that it’s overly sentimental and light-weight. You could call it light-weight if you want, but I think that’s only really true in regards to other Richard Powers books. It’s probably his shortest, actually I am certain it is, but his next shortest Generosity, is the weakest of the one’s I’ve read. Instead, this book is oddly and sneakily bleak, as opposed to sentimental. I won’t fully explain that as it involves spoilers. The model of the book […]

An early Richard Powers novel (as in from 1988 before he was 30), about a family dominated by a loud, large, father. This novel is written from multiple viewpoints and narrators both third and first-person, and includes several short sections written from Powers’s voice dealing with the real life death of his father. This last part is something that Powers does from time to time, puts himself into his fiction, in fictional and not so fictional ways. The takes place primarily in the 1970s and […]