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| Richard Powers |
He did physics at university and once worked as a computer programmer. Now, though you may never have heard of him, Richard Powers is being hailed by some critics as America’s greatest living novelist. Emma Brockes meets a reluctant literary celebrity in rural Illinois
Friday 14 March 2003
B
Of the six or so writers routinely anointed by critics as "America's greatest living novelist", Powers is perhaps the least well known. What is known about him intensifies the mystery: as well as authoring terrifically brainy books, he has a degree in theoretical physics, used to be a computer programmer and lives in the flatlands of southern Illinois, all of which guarantees him identification with the Salinger school of reclusive genius. For many years, he was uncomfortable giving interviews. (Despite pressure from his publisher, he didn't speak to the press until the publication of his third novel and wouldn't allow his photograph to be used on the dustjacket until the fifth.) Like Larkin, he finds the act of formally advertising his personality stressful and strange, an attitude that success has forced him to abandon. After 15 years of working in semi-obscurity, the reception of his eighth novel has thrown Powers, blinking, into the spotlight.
The Time of Our Singing is not an obvious vehicle for stardom. It is long - 631 pages - and while using the blockbustery formula of the family saga, the themes it explores are rigorously highbrow: the relationship between race, time and motion ("there is no becoming, there just is"); the ownership of culture; the myths of American national identity. So inspired have the US critics been by it that Powers is not, now, merely the country's "greatest living novelist" (Boston Review), but also its "most ambitious novelist" (San Francisco Chronicle), its "smartest novelist" (the Village Voice), and its "pre-eminent novelist of ideas". (Salon). The New York Times, after solemnly cross-examining the integrity of his characters, pronounced Powers "prodigiously gifted" and an heir to Tolstoy, and he has been compared elsewhere to Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and, more sensibly, Don De Lillo, with whom he shares certain fields of interest and a reputation for chilly prose.
One hundred and fifty miles and a 20-minute flight south of Chicago is the town of Urbana, Illinois. It is part lefty university town (Powers eventually staunched his weirdness by taking a sociable job teaching creative writing at the University of Illinois and Jane, his wife, is a French professor) and part plush commuterville, with wide streets and pretty white houses. Powers greets me at the airport in the uniform of the former - slackerish jeans and T-shirt, hair long to the collar and an earnest, rolling gait, which gives him an air of boyishness. Although he was born in the mid-West, Powers was taken at the age of 10 to live in Thailand. His father, a high-school teacher, had been posted to the International School of Bangkok.
The sense of displacement this caused was a way into writing The Time of Our Singing, a book about a mixed-race family trying to figure out where it belongs in the sharply segregated world of the 1950s and 60s. At one point, Ruth, the daughter of a white, German physicist and a black American singer, complains: "Nobody at school knows what to make of me. Gangs of those Irish-Italian-Swede dumpling girls talk to me slowly, through foot-long smiles, swearing how close they've always been to their domestic help. But at the Afro Pride meetings, there's always some sister grumbling out loud about infiltration by funny-featured, white-talking spies."
"I can't pretend that anything I've ever experienced can compare to what black or mixed-race people confront on a daily basis in this country," says Powers. He speaks with the quiet fervour of someone on Thought for the Day, levelled by the effects of a cold into a nasal drone. "But I can say that I drew on weak analogies in my own past, most specifically being an American child in Asia. I would be visually identified on the street. When I opened my mouth and started speaking Thai, in the way that children are capable of when they pick up a language, I delighted in the sense of imbalance - and category-breaking - that I could instantly see in the faces of people that I met."
It disabused him of at least one assumption of privilege. "Only white men," he says, "have the luxury of ignoring race."
Given Powers' thoughtfulness and the soft, breathless urgency of his speech, it is odd that he has come to be characterised as a dispassionate writer, as one who, as he says of a character in the novel, puts "precision before warmth". Part of this is bias against his background - computer programming is not thought to deliver the sorts of insights required of a novelist - and part against the subject matter of his novels: artificial intelligence, game theory and molecular genetics are sufficiently removed from the traditional interests of the literary imagination to ensure that Powers is dismissed as a geek writer; that is, long on brains, short on humanity. With typical mildness, he says he finds this "a little bit of an irritation".
In fact, Powers insists that programming and novel-writing are not so vastly different, nor science and art - "both are speculations about where we've been put down. The difference, of course, is gauge." As a child, he read natural history books. In 1975 he began a physics degree at the University of Illinois, intending to make his career in science. But as the course grew more specialised, so he became depressingly aware of all the things he wasn't doing. The answer, he thought, was to change discipline and for his masters degree he read literature. Studying Proust kept him happy for a year or so, but as the prospect of a doctorate loomed, the feeling of claustrophobia pressed in again, triggering what he calls the "central crisis of my life" - how to satisfy his conflicting interests without becoming a useless dilettante. "For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities."
Unresolved, Powers took a job in computer programming. In retrospect, he says, bits of it were analogous to writing: "the pleasure of getting all my circus animals to coordinate their stunts - running through their tricks and communicating to each other and signalling to all the little subalterns of these programmes. To create a kind of symphony that's larger than any constituent part: all of these were great lessons in the long form of the novel. How to think structurally and locally at the same time." It wasn't until Powers happened across August Sander's famous photograph, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, that he felt the urge to write. The identity of the three men in the picture preoccupied him so much that he decided to put his speculations in a novel, a decision that attests to a certain breezy confidence beneath the modest demeanour.
The book, which shares its title with the photograph, was praised by critics for its intelligence, but what excited Powers was his own reaction to it: at the age of 32, his indecision was over. "It was the discovery that I didn't have to give up anything that electrified me about writing," he says. "Here was a place where being a dilettante was actually an asset. You could, for two years, live vicariously as a German farmer or a molecular geneticist, that thing that you gave up at 18 and figured you'd never visit again."
In The Time of Our Singing, Powers asks: "Who is enough, in being himself?" It is a reference not only to his appetite for diversity, but to more general questions about the interplay between self and social definition. Racism, he asserts, an issue about which America is notoriously dishonest, is as much to do with the fear of similarity - the fear of "mongrelisation through mixing" - as the fear of difference. "This longstanding image of the melting pot, which for years stood as the emblem of liberal tolerance and democratic egalitarianism, has in recent years been interrogated and seen as the most normative pressure for conforming."
The central metaphor of Powers' book is music: He builds page-long riffs around the performances of Jonah, a boy with a perfect singing voice ("my brother sings to save the good and make the wicked take their own lives"), answering charges of coldness with something that comes closer, at times, to schmaltz. If there is occasionally too much soaring and swooping and lifting of hearts, the metaphor gets nicely at the workings of social hierarchy, how arbitrary and changing it is, a system into which race as a single variable is fed. "An E," he says, "is not an E. It is one thing in the key of E and another in the key of A and another in the key of G. The whole idea of keys is all contextual and time-bound. The whole idea of self is as an unfinished melody."
Powers' two literary heroes, Thomas Hardy and James Joyce, are such textbook opposites as to seem almost contrived to show off the breadth of his interests. Against their conflicting schools of realism, he compares the realism of film and television, which, he says, increasingly confuses the representation of reality with the thing itself. There is a drop of the sour grapes authors reserve for more popular media in this, but also genuine disquiet at how telly does all the work for you. Imagination, he says, is becoming undermined by the "tyranny of the literal lens". The consequences of this are at best banality, at worst what he calls "disastrous analogical effects".
After September 11, Powers wrote a comment piece about this for the New York Times. "It was about how every response to this unthinkably real disaster had been cast as a simile to some kind of artistic or highly stylised representation. There were people saying, 'It was like this Bruce Willis movie.' We had only our media metaphors to draw on."
(If all this makes him sound like a killjoy, when I mention how well The Time of Our Singing might work as a movie, he grins and says, "Terrific, if you could drum up some interest.")
Against the encroachment of pseudo-reality, Powers stacks what he calls "the slow arts". "A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time."
He does not doubt that, over time, the slow arts have power to change perception, in the way that running water cuts into rock over generations. An artist doesn't often get solid proof of his influence, however, or of the value of his work, and very occasionally, Powers wishes he was still in physics. "It's the definitive quality of science that I miss the most. When you've proved a theory, no one is going to... I mean, you never have that certainty as an artist."
He knows that ultimately, however, he is in the right game. While the success of The Time of Our Singing has increased his sense of certainty, the lesson of the book is that precariousness is good; stability is staying inside for a year, not talking to anyone; we only, really, exist in relation to other people.
"We will live with racism for ever," says Powers. "But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs."
· The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers is published by Arrow, priced £14.99
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