Plowing the Dark
February 26th, 2003by Richard Powers
ISBN: 0312280122
Richard Powers is one smart guy who knows how to write: it is obvious on every page in this book. What I found most curious in reading this book was the fact that while I liked it, I was not emotionally attached to it. This is a novel more about ideas than emotions, and the ideas the characters have are a bigger part of the story than their feelings. Actions are provisional, dialogue is always italicized. Reading it provides a good workout for your brain.
The narrative, starting off in the late 1980s, is split in two. In one part, conflicted artist Adie Klarpol is convinced by a friend from her college days to leave New York for Seattle to go to work for a silicon powerhouse. Once there, she finds the more or less expected bunch of techno-misfits obsessed with their project — virtual reality as the Next Big Thing, as The Future. In the other part, an American citizen and refugee from a torturous relationship is taken hostage in the Middle East.
The world in one narrative gets richer as processing time and algorithms get better, enabling motion and sound to fool the brain into accepting the perceived as the real. The characters thrash through what love is, what middle age means, how to connect and disconnect from other people, and what the point is — of work, of art, of life. This is intercut with scenes from the world in the other narrative getting smaller: a mind folds in on itself with nowhere else to go, life is stripped to the barest essentials necessary for physical survival, plus an added dash of spontaneous cruelty. The hostage has more of only one thing than he could ever want or need, and one thing the world of the first narrative doesn’t know how to deal with in its endless hurry — time.
Because this is a Richard Powers novel, the two stories do come together (but not really) and while it seems like the novel is working toward an important ending where everything will seamlessly connect and hidden secrets will be revealed, instead you get an important ending that makes you scratch your head. Setting the tech ten years before the novel was written was a good choice, putting the focus more on what things mean than where they are going. That the first gulf war erupts toward the end of the book makes it seem more, not less, timely with this focus.
I loved that this novel picks over so many different questions. What is the intersection of art and technology? What drives people? And one of my favorite memes in the book, what should you see before you die?
