Acclaimed Novelist Powers Perfects His Aesthetic

Midway through “Generosity,” Richard Powers’ stunning new novel, the charming businessman and geneticist Robert Kurton participates in a public debate with an unnamed novelist. The subject: genetic enhancement of human beings. The shy author begins, awkwardly reading from a prewritten speech. But his argument is complex, as Powers writes, “The writer’s thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on.” Even the narration has trouble following the train of thought. Kurton takes stage, joking, “Every divide between the Two Cultures is bridgeable, except this one: humanists write out their talks and scientists extemporize.” With his mixture of humorous anecdotes and general charisma, Kurton emerges the clear winner. Modernity, Powers illustrates, shuffles the artist’s and the scientist’s roles: as the artist appeals to reason, the scientist to emotion and narrative.

This conflation of the sciences and the humanities is perhaps the most identifiable characteristic about Powers’s work, be it via virtual reality in 2000’s “Plowing the Dark” or artificial intelligence in 1995’s “Galatea 2.2.” He succeeds again in “Generosity,” his tenth novel, this time in bringing contemporary science into the dramatic foreground by exploring the world of genetic enhancement.

“Generosity” follows the lives of an unusually jubilant Algerian refugee, Thassa Amzwar, and her creative nonfiction instructor, Russell Stone, as they and the rest of America respond to Kurton’s announcement. The scientist’s latest initiative has discovered a convincing correlation between a particular set of genes and emotional temperament: for all intents and purposes, a ‘happiness gene.’ After it is confirmed that Thassa suffers from this genetic predisposition to happiness, she becomes an overnight Internet celebrity. The book charts Thassa’s rise through the blogosphere all the way up to “The Oona Show” (a fictional analog for Oprah), until she reaches a level of fame whose pressure threatens to break even her seemingly indominable happiness.

Powers thus combines the recent public attention to the positive psychology movement, genetic enhancement, and the democratic atmosphere of the internet into a novel that examines happiness from a thoroughly modern—and therefore highly empirical—standpoint. “How programmed are we?” Russell vulnerably begs. His girlfriend, a therapist, responds honestly, but then adds encouragingly, “Temperament can self-modify. People can get free, or at least a little freer.” This is not enough for Russell, who laments, “But not as free as we’re bred to believe we are.” Science, while altering our contemporary conception of happiness, changes none of our feelings of not having it.

In a moral environment split between the fast moving, forward-looking pharmaceutical industry and the ineffectually resistant humanities, Powers does not take sides, but considers the issue from both points of views, simultaneously. “Generosity” thereby succeeds in engaging its scientific subject matter honestly, and therefore that much more significantly. It is this respect for—but distance from—the science that allows Powers to arrive at the book’s core issue: Genetic engineering, for all the moral qualms that arise from it, gives humanity a chance to rewrite, to edit, to choose its own genetic story.

This is the central idea behind the novel, and “Generosity” explores it in endless, and often brilliant, variations. Russell’s subject—creative nonfiction—is exactly what genetic enhancement is: reality, just with some creativity, to make it something you want to read about. The book he chooses to teach from, which itself is fictional, is called “Make Your Writing Come Alive,” which describes what DNA is: a language that has created life. The connections drawn between writing and DNA early on in the book shape a theme emergent in many of Powers’ books, that of analogues to writing itself.

What makes the book truly interesting resides in Powers’s ability to be formally experimental while remaining fully readable, and totally earnest. A strange, authorial “I” punctuates the book, deliberating the text’s future and reflecting on its past. “I know what kind of story I’d make from this one, if I could: the kind that, from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there’s no choice like chance.” We are not merely reading a story, but rather we are watching the creation of a story, like a life form rising from dancing nucleotides. Powers’s books have a propensity to remind the reader of their role, yet nowhere in his oeuvre does he do it so thoroughly, or effectively, as in “Generosity.” Powers manages this postmodern trope without creating an ironic distance. There is the prevailing sentiment that Powers has too much at stake to mask his work in the presumptions of irony. Far from simply instructing the reader, Powers is discovering his truths as he writes.

As the book self-consciously asserts itself as a novel being written by a novelist, one can sense it struggling with the rush of mediums we’re subjected to as modern Americans. “Generosity” moves out of prose, adopting styles that range from mimicking a screenplay—in a particularly moving scene—to a collage of YouTube videos. Instead of rejecting changing modes of communication, Powers accepts them, explores them, and engages with them on their own terms.

In the above mentioned debate scene, after Kurton’s engaging response, the unidentified novelist changes his tone. He gives up, tells the audience, the whole species, to “go enhance.” But he issues a warning: “We’ll never feel enhanced… When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.”

This is why Powers, among his likeminded contemporaries, is worth reading. Time and time again, he provides us with more and more resistant strains of fiction. The humanities, resisting science, seem to want to hold it back so that the old truths hold. Powers, on the other hand, is positively straining to see what’s coming, writing with the passion of the discoverers in the sestet of Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” In a world that is, above all, confused by its own amazing progress, Powers is a stabilizing force, taking a step back, slowing down, to show us, our hearts and heads alike, what we are doing, and where we are going.

The book’s final punchline comes from its subtitle. Just about every cover of a Powers book has the subtitle: “A Novel.” For “Generosity,” the subtitle is: “An Enhancement.” Here is where Powers’s ability to transcend the boundaries of the story simply shines. As genetic enhancement is the insertion of an externally synthesized gene into the human genome, a novel is an externally synthesized story added to the reader’s memory, the reader’s experience. Reading gives us a chance to live other lives, to experience things we otherwise wouldn’t have, to make mistakes on the page so that we don’t have to make them in real life. In this way, we leave the novel, letting our eyes adjust to the light of the real, changed, with a new experience doing its work in us that will effect us for the rest of our lives. We leave our reading experience, ourselves enhanced.