Comments on: Mining the Backlist

By: KF

KF — Fri, 21 Jun 2002 21:28:52 +0000

I don’t think you’re wrong, at all. As my memory serves (and you can see here evidence of its questionable reliability), Powers-the-novelist is very hard on Powers-the-character for his treatment of both A. and C., without ever giving the sense that Powers-the-character is aware of that treatment—and that the sentimentalizing of the lost love and the objectifying of the graduate student are part and parcel of that treatment. As is the “poor me, I’ve behaved so badly” motif of Powers-the-character’s memory of his behaviors toward them. So the novel seems to me to treat Powers himself as an unreliable narrator, who cannot be trusted, and about the women least of all.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I think the novel’s end (Galatea’s totally romanticized death, and Powers’ sudden inspiration to write once again) strongly suggests that, whatever Powers (and I’m not sure whether I mean the character or the novelist) may have learned in the novel’s course, it didn’t exactly take.

As to Wandering Soul, lemme just say that this is one dark book. Deeply depressing, and with sadly little possible in the way of redeeming lessons learned. But, I think, perhaps the most honest of his stuff that I’ve read so far, and at moments the most beautiful.

By: mariah

mariah — Fri, 21 Jun 2002 21:07:57 +0000

Do you think he was hard on C. and A.? I thought he was putting so much effort into being hard on Richard Powers–bending over backwards showing how unfair Richard was to C. and A. and their abilities–that he ended up sort of idealizing and sentimentalizing aspects of the women in an attempt to mask how annoying he found them.

But it’s been something like five years since I read it; if you tell me I am wrong, I happily believe you. Neither Gold or Gala made me want to hurl myself from a bridge, though–is Wandering Soul wildly different?

By: KF

KF — Fri, 21 Jun 2002 20:29:29 +0000

Good point. Finished Wandering Soul this morning, and once I’d talked myself out of hanging by the neck from my balcony rail, I decided that, whatever the flaws of Jan in Gold Bug and Linda in Wandering Soul, they’re still preferable to C. and A.

But I wonder how much of that patronization is a self-patronization, because the novel’s pretty hard on “Richard Powers,” too…

By: mariah

mariah — Fri, 21 Jun 2002 19:51:28 +0000

If you really liked Galatea, I suggest you NOT go back to it for awhile, unless you’re going to write about it right away. You run the risk of liking it a little bit less, is my guess.

I loved Galatea too: having read it after Goldbug (my intro to Powers, and as good a window into some of his concerns as Galatea, I think) I found the later book more mature, less self-indulgent (I got a bit tired of all the quotations in Goldbug--it felt like he’d been saving them up since high school and was determined to get them all in).

However, reading Gold. first made Gala. seem narrower, less ambitious and sweeping. I sympathize with his irritation with postcolonial theory--Lord knows I do--but it scaled back the scope of the book somehow: I too mourn for the canon, but how many people outside academia do? I was glad he dropped Goldbug’s female p.o.v., which wasn’t particularly convincing, in my opinion, but the faintly patronizing nature of the representations of the girlfriend and the star student still suggest room for improvement.

That said, Galatea made me cry real tears. Come back, Helen!