Finisterre

As postmodernism’s biological clock ticked toward midnight, Richard Powers forged a novelistic synthesis between the centripetal immersive experience offered by the traditional novel, and the illusion-stripping centrifugal energies associated with postmodern metafiction. The postmodern ancestors of this hybrid were named in the author’s own essays. He was one of John Barth’s “late comer legatees,” the offspring of “grand master” “Pop” Pynchon. Working under their shadow, the blueprint he produced looked something like this: dual or triple narratives set out the foundations of a well-behaved realist novel, eliciting and rewarding reader interest with relatively traditional narrative hooks. Essayistic asides raised the intellectual stakes, seeking dazzling parallels between disparate territories—matching the growth of a business with metastatizing cancer, merging Bach with Crick and Watson. After lengthy immersion in the realist dimensions of this world, postmodern trickery produced what Powers called a concluding “jump shift in epistemic levels” that reconfigured the preceding narratives as artificial constructs.

Yet aside from reconciling opposing traditions, buried in this model was also a theory of how art might relate to society. First, art must act as a refuge from the world, as “the stream of narrative overflows the banks of the real.” But total withdrawal is an irresponsible delusion, and the final jump-shift is designed to return us once more to engagement in the world. As Powers writes in Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988), fiction is “a place to hide out in long enough to learn how to come back.”

In varying ways, this model stands relatively firm through his early fiction, and Powers’s eleventh novel, Orfeo (2014), shares many characteristics with this well-established model. The book is built out of three intertwined narrative threads—what the novel calls “spliced-together monologues”—all devoted to the aging composer, Peter Els. Of the two main threads, the first recounts Els’s past—his various compositions and creative collaborations, his broken marriage and estranged daughter—as they lead up to his late-career shift from music to the “garage genomics” he carries out in a homemade biology lab. The second strand concerns the present, detailing a Kafkaesque chance encounter with the state, in which Els manages to arouse so much suspicion when the police come across his microbiology lab that Homeland Security brands him the “Biohacker Bach” as he flees Urbana, moving through St. Louis and Arizona, to California. In the third narrative, Powers (like Jennifer Egan in “Black Box”) turns to Twitter for a soundbyte “confession” that Els begins late in the narrative, but which is projected back through to the earlier parts of the book. Along the way there are plenty of signature Powers moments to enjoy: virtuoso reflections on music (particularly Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”), sudden parallactic jumps (the eyeblink of human history gives way to a vision of the last 3.5 billion years as “the Age of Bacteria”), and a vertiginous shift in perspective at the novel’s end.

Detail from cover

Yet while the book reprises Powers’s signature obsessions, it also seems to represent a threshold for the model that has carried Powers’s imaginative project this far. From the basic perspective of chronology, it’s notable that Powers’s first ten books were produced with remarkable regularity, with no more than a three-year gap between novels. After Generosity (2009), however, readers have faced an uncharacteristic five-year pause. This gap is minor compared to, say, the near-decade that Eugenides took to write the relatively unambitious The Marriage Plot (2011), and it would seem incidental if Orfeo was not so explicitly about the breakdown of the model Powers has established.

Dark clouds have been gathering in his recent books, and they make what is probably middle-period Powers looks like the melancholy late fiction of a much older writer. Crowds have become increasingly important in this work—Generosity and Orfeo are full of them—and they render the idea of an aesthetic haven seem quaint. Watching his daughter populate an...