DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Its cover proclaims it to be “the most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow,” which I’ve never heard of, which should tell you how many ambitious American novels I read. I discovered this book through a “you might also enjoy” link at Amazon, and although I don’t remember what title I’d been researching, the recommendation gnomes at Amazon were right: I also liked this book.

It’s vast, or I guess “ambitious” if I were a lit scholar. Either way means the same: 600+ pages with frequent detours into microbiology, art history, and music theory. It’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The writing is brilliant, obviously so even to a pedestrian pop-fiction aficionado like me. The text contains dozens of instances of subtle wordplay that will delight the language geeks in the audience. Here are two examples:

A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor’s cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler’s area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering’s side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. (p. 248)

Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. (p. 292)

In construction, this story is similar to Cryptonomicon, which is also long (err, “ambitious”) and peopled by memorable, complex characters. Both stories span 50 years. Both stories contain detailed and intelligent forays beyond the narrative. Both recently appeared in a Jon Carroll’s list of “brainy, pyrotechnical novels” (along with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which I’ve added to my reading list for the summer).

At the heart of Powers’ story is the obsession of one character with DNA (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from very few base compounds) and with Bach’s piano composition “The Goldberg Variations” (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from a simple base melody). While the discussions of biology and life science did not appeal, the analyses of Bach’s music did, so much so that I wished I’d had a copy of the music handy, as a soundtrack to the text. (For reference, the recording that captivated Ressler is Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording, catalog #BWV 988.)

This book is challenging, but challenge has its rewards. I recommend it.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

posted to area: Fiction
updated: 2004-04-19 05:53:31