The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

In a literary career spanning more than two dozen years, Richard Powers has carved a niche for himself exploring various scientific and medical themes in his novels, such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. In 2006, he was awarded the National Book Award for The Echo Maker, in which he used a brain injury to his protagonist as an avenue for exploring cognitive neurology. In his third novel, The Gold Bug Variations, published in 1991, Powers explored the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, the intricacies of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, and the consequences of love and loss on a lifetime:

I never said anything I wanted to say to anyone. I've misinterpreted the whole set from the start. That table of data in the nucleotides isn't about reading at all. It's about saying, out loud, everything there is, while it's still sayable. The whole, impossibly complex goldberg invention of speech, wasted on someone who from the first listened only to that string of molecules governing cowardice. Obvious, out in the open: every measure, every vertical instant infused with that absurd little theme insisting "Live, live," and me objecting, "But what if it should be real? What if it all means something? What if someone should hold me to my words?"

The novel contains two interwoven storylines, one set on the cusp of scientific breakthrough in the 1950s and another twenty-five years later in the early days of the computer revolution. The narratives are connected through the enigmatic figure of Stuart Ressler. In the early storyline, Ressler is on the cutting edge of scientific academia, exploring the frontiers of DNA and genetics. By the mid-1980s, Ressler is working the night shift at a firm conducting overnight computer processing. There he would have toiled in utter anonymity if not for the intervention of his coworker Frank Todd, who becomes curious about Ressler's past. He seeks assistance at the local branch library, where he finds eccentric research librarian Jan O'Deigh, who provides the bulk of the novel's narration. At the start of the novel, O'Deigh has received word of Ressler's death, inspiring a reminiscence of the day she met the inscrutable old man:

He wore a forgettable light suit, a narrow maroon tie not seen since the fifties, and an immaculate oxford button-down, carefully ironed but pilled to exhaustion around the collar. He emitted the aura--accurate, it turned out--that he found buying clothes too embarrassing. He was over the median age by twenty years. As I started, wondering if this was an assault, the figure said, in a voice rattling like a cracked distributor, "Excuse me, Miss. There's been a mistake." I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. Worse--the ultimate terror for my profession--I had no source to appeal to.

The strength of Powers' literature lies in his ability to explore intricate or advanced intellectual concept with grace and ease. The very concept of the common nature of the genetic code and the structure of Bach's composition is a thing of beauty, as is the parallel between Ressler's search to understand these mysteries and Todd and O'Deigh's quest to uncover Ressler's past:

For all that we finally discovered about him, Dr. Ressler still came from and returned to nowhere. His life was a cipher, his needs one of those latent anthologies, safe deposit boxes filled with tickets to urgent, forgotten banquets. Our sustained misreading of the man was my fault. Todd put me on his trail, and I went after him as an abstraction, a chemistry unknown that, mixed with the right reagent, reveals itself by going rose or precipitating. I looked fora postulate, completely missing the empiricist's point. Now, when it no longer helps, I see the person he stood for is the one who is gone.

Powers is oft-criticized, with a good degree of justification, for making plotting and characterization secondary to his ambitious intellectual themes and his lush word play. This certainly applies to Gold Bug; the pacing lags badly at several points, coming to a virtual halt for extended discussions of genetics or musical composition. The dialogue is often stilted, the character development either non-existent or subservient to the themes. But that is one gets when one reads Powers. As the original New York Times review put it, "the purpose of this plot setup is less to tell a story than to explore structural possibilities, codes, metaphors, ingenuity in language." At such exploration, there are few authors who can match Richard Powers.