Galatea 2.2

I'm currently reading Richard Powers's fifth novel, Galatea 2.2, and the book is pulling me in two separate directions. On the one hand, something must be right when a novel can give you lines like "thought looks away from the distraction of what is" and "desire was the voicegram of memory." Moreover, this book not even spews out poetic thinkers like that with impressive regularity, but it ponders the cerebral infrastructure beneath them.

But on the other hand, I'm finding that at least half of this book feels phoned-in.

Powers has a good premise for Galatea 2.2. It's thus: Richard Powers has been awarded a one-year appointment to a new $50 million cognitive research center (the token humanist, he calls himself) in the university he attended as a grad student. At loose ends and just finishing up his fourth novel, about which he feels a quiet dread, and stymied at the beginning of his next, Powers prowls the halls looking for something to do.

It's not long before Powers is brought into a cognitive-literary wager: a number of scientists who believe that cognition cannot be reduced to mechanics bet a misanthropic colleague named Lentz (who believes the opposite) that he cannot create a machine that will fool an impartial human. The way they will test the machine is by having it digest all the works on a 6-page list Powers had to master for his master's degree and answer questions about them. If the machine can do better than a human (to be picked later), then the misanthrope Lentz the bet. Guess who gets to be Lentz's assistant?

This part of the book is very engaging, and I think this is a great premise for a Richard Powers novel. Powers gives us a good feel for what a sad, lonely jerk Lentz is, particularly with expressive dialog, and vividly renders his and Lentz's interactions as they work on this artificial intelligence. For instance, after Lentz sees what a bad typist Powers is, he says

How the hell are we supposed to get anything done? What do you peak at, twenty words per minute? And what you lack in speed you make up for in blundering. What's with the three-and-a-half-finger method, anyway?

And later on, Lentz, who enjoys derisively calling Powers "little Marcel" says:

Marcel, don't try to impress me. Save that for your hapless readers.

Reading this part, I get the feel that we are exploring the development of two characters, with the scientific erudition necessary to understand cog sci a well-integrated digression. From time to time there's a bit too much explaining--first we did this, then we did this, then we did this--but for the most part the plotting is strong and I'm curious to see what happens with the bet and Powers's writing career. Moreover, Powers's subtext--comparing writing a novel to creating an artificial brain that thinks like a human--is very provocative. For good measure, he makes some very astute forward-looking remarks about the Internet (in 1995, when the novel was published, the Internet was not nearly the phenomenon it is today), and integrates it into the discussion.

Where this book is faltering for me is with the other plot. This one tells of Richard Powers the recent grad--his relationship with a woman he met while teaching an undergrad class and the writing of his first novel. The problem here is that it always feels like I am reading this narrative at a distance. The characters of young Richard and his love (only known as "C.") feel like 2-D representations of your typical couple at loose ends after college. This part is described, not told, which is a shame, because I have seen what Powers can do, and he can do much more than this. For example:

We were alone. For the first time in our lives, neither of us was going anywhere. We navigated from winter night to winter night, in a state where winder starts in October and rages on into May. In an apartment halfway along its forced march from genteel to desperate, we made a home too familiar for words.

Now, there's nothing wrong with this kind of fly-over narration if used sparingly to jet us past certain spots, but when virtually the entire story is narrated in these bland, distant terms, we have a problem. I don't want to be told that "we made a home too familiar for words," I want to see it being made. Moreover, there's no suspense in this plot. We know Powers will write his novel and become a famous author, that his relationship will end badly. The only thing in it for us is a vivid portrayal of it happening, but we're not getting that. And, lastly, halfway through the novel, I'm still not seeing the links between this narrative and the other one. Other than to flesh out the character of Powers, I'm not sure why it is here.

My whole dislike of the young Powers narrative is exacerbated by the fact that the present-day narrative--the one where Lentz and Powers are building their great literary brain--is so damn good. Powers is undertaking a scientific exploration of some of the more interesting ideas raised by 20th-century literature. That is a pretty good idea.

Not only that, but he is taking almost every chance offered him to sling a few shots at literary academia. For instance, after a digression into how many billions upon billions of neurons need to fire to just say "the boy took the ball" Powers declares

Every postmodern postsolipsist, I thought, should do a postfrontal neurology stint. . . . Once they saw the bewilderingly complex fiber in its impossible live weave, theorists would forever opt for the humblest, least-obtrusive sentence allowed them.

Amen.

Also, there is a kind of running gag about how the task of making a computer that can talk about books like a human is simplified by the majority of lit professors, whose stilted, empty lit crit sounds more like a computer every day. That's funny.

So, as I dive into the second half of Galatea 2.2, I'm hoping that either the young Powers narrative winds itself up or gets a little better. There is lots to like in this book, but, unfortunately, there's also more than a little bit to not like.

Comments

[daniel]

Hey man,
love what you do and check the blog almost daily, so thanks.
i, too, am working my way through a powers novel "the time of our singing". i'm about 7/8th through this book and have been reading in stunned awe from page one. so many different themes and counter-themes playing against each other and hardly a false note sounded.
still, there's something i couldn't quit put my finger on until i read you describe the sub-plot of "galatea". it's the flyover narration, the feeling that something is being described rather than told. i don't want to fall into that "powers is a cold-fish writer who can't convey interiority" crap because it's clearly not true. the man can probe consciousness, he understands feeling and can describe how people think--but everything is so damn deep, so complicated, it's like these characters live their lives and never think once about making a sandwich. am i a dolt to ask for this? has the relentless mundanity of DFW's narratives skewed the way we read?
what a beautiful book, though, oh, what a beautiful book.

[Donna]

Love your blog, BTW.
I finished Galatea 2.2 this weekend. I didn't much like the story of his relationship with C. but - until I read your blog - I couldn't put my finger on why...
Have you finished it yet? I'm curious what you thought of the rest of the book.

[Richard]

Somehow I missed this post when it first appeared. Donna's comment drew my attention to it.

I have to say I'm surprised by this mid-reading response. I've read everything Powers has written, and I think Galatea 2.2 remains his finest novel; I certainly find it considerably superior to The Echo Maker. It seems odd to me that you would chide him for, essentially, "telling not showing". In my opinion the "show don't tell" dictum is one of the worst rules out there.

Anyway, like Donna, I am curious what you thought of the rest of it. Did the C subplot fit in better for you? I thought it was clear why it was there...

[Scott]

Richard and Donna,

Unfortunately the book did not end up being one I liked. Frankly, I thought the writing was very loose, making much of the second half a chore to get through. Many things were expressed two and three times, and there was a lot of clunky writing.

The sections with C. felt, to me, flat, with Powers's attempts to create emotional intensity largely a failure. I never saw C. as a real person, and I didn't feel anything for the disintegration of their relationship. (For a look at what I felt was a successful emotional section, see the part where Powers has dinner with the professor with the mentally different child. I thought that section was handled very well, and it felt very real and potent to me.)

I also have to say that I found the subplot with the female grad student creepy. I'm not sure why Powers included it, other than to give me a distinctly bad impression of the narrator.

[Dan]

I am midway through Galatea.I read Plowing the Dark,and as a relatively inexperienced english literature reader,I was hugely gratified.Although I am struggling to recover the magic,the almost religious experience I had,self-consciously,reading a novel about VR.However,I do feel that the WORK I put in,the interpretative effort,was instrumental in creating that experience.This has a bearing on my feelings about the comments above.I, too, feel like walking away from C as a character.
As to suspense,the book is highly self-conscious and metafictional and we know the outcome.But, in effect, "Apollo 13" is a metafictional experience too,in a way,.As is a fifth experience of Hamlet in the theatre.
And while feeling too that I dont feel for C or dont see her as a real person,I still nag myself,scratch my head :- "What status do our feelings about fictional characters have?"What have I a right to expect?Or what is it I reflexively,emotionally,would like to think I have a right to expect?

I am not supposed to do a simple act of suspension of disbelief here.What is "not feeling anything for the characters" actually indicative of,symptomatic of?

A basic premise of this novel is that literature is in question.A scientist intends to fool people into thinking that the responses of a machine, to an exam in eng.lit., are human,thus putting into question their very notions,as "humanists",of what it is to be human.To this scientist ,possibly,the idea of being human,being a character,is a red herring.

Lentz,the scientist,is a heartless,machine-like,self-conscious,cruel bastard.And of course he isnt,as well.But never mind whether he is "human" or not .The common irony is that we can actually end up,as a reader,caring for him.This made up,constructed character,the product of a writer's imagination, who,among other things, does a job of symbolising certain ideas for Powers.

Unless we walk away,which is perfectly legitimate response.This novel is certainly giving me a headache.A lot of emotional intensity.But ideas about whether I have failed,OR the novelist,nag me as not really being the point.

Powers is not standing on one side of a redundant two cultures debate.As far as I understand ,having waded through quite a lot of criticism.He parodies literary criticism,so, for the more naive reader,seeming to put in question the whole enterprise he is involved in.That for me was the beauty of PTD - Powers seemed as if he was going to threaten the whole idea of the novel, but ,for this embattled reader,strengthened it instead.

Fabulous blog.