FICTION IN REVIEW

1 4 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N J . B U R N Following a night racked with insomnia in the early summer of 1880, Thomas Hardy hovered uneasily by his window, surveying the London skyline. The Hardys were living in Upper Tooting, in a building whose elevated position a√orded a panoramic view across the city, and as he watched from an upper back bedroom, Hardy saw the proximate dawn circling the city: A golden light behind the horizon; within it are the Four Millions. The roofs are damp gray: the streets are still filled with night as with a dark stagnant flood whose surface brims to the tops of the houses. Above the air is light. A fire or two glares within the mass. Behind are Highgate Hills. On the Crystal Palace hills in the other direction a lamp is still burning up in the daylight. The lamps are also still flickering in the street, and one policeman walks down it as if it were noon. This melancholy vision, where the gray expanse of London streets shades into a biblical flood, was deeply rooted in Hardy’s imaginaG e n e r o s i t y , by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 204 pp., $25.00) 1 4 9 R tion. His second wife reports that on such nights Hardy ‘‘could not sleep, partly on account of an eerie feeling which sometimes haunted him, a horror at lying down in close proximity to ‘a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes.’ ’’ Richard Powers – who once identified Hardy as one of his two great literary ancestors – has inherited some of Hardy’s dark, brooding, vision, and the contemporary population explosion, a massive, unruly o√spring of Hardy’s London, provides the stage on which his tenth novel, Generosity, unfolds. The novel begins, ‘‘A man rides backward in a packed subway car. This must be almost fall, the season of revision. I picture him in . . . the world’s twenty-fifth biggest urban sprawl, one wedged in the population charts between Tianjin and Lima. . . . The El car is so full tonight that everyone’s near invisible.’’ With characteristic deftness, Powers establishes the foundation of his novel’s thematic focus with this opening snapshot. The bustle of the subway car is the reader’s introduction to a sclerotic world where overpopulation shadows every mundane action: a diurnal commute produces an ‘‘evening human waterfall’’; a tra≈c light changes, allowing ‘‘the accumulated mounds of crowd’’ to ‘‘disgorge into one another,’’ creating an ‘‘omnidirectional tsunami’’; a trip to an airport is a confrontation with a ‘‘seething free-for-all.’’ Lost in the middle of these threatening crowds is the unnamed man of the first sentence – Russell Stone, an essayist turned editor turned teacher who is about to begin a semester teaching nonfiction at a Chicago college. As his position in the subway car indicates, Stone moves forward in life by looking backward, which is to say that his initial story is one where a bruising contact with the future is mostly strangled by an obsessive recollection of painful memories from his past. But Stone is partially startled out of his circuit of melancholy when he meets a student, Thassadit Amzwar, whose personality falls far beyond the horizon of his gloomy circle of experience. While Stone’s worldview takes its coloring from what the novel calls ‘‘depressive realism,’’ Thassa seems impossibly joyous. Untainted by an anguish-ridden past in Algeria (murdered father, mother lost to cancer) and an attempted rape in the United States, she retains a radiant happiness in the face of life’s cruelty that becomes a puzzle Stone needs to solve. Like a score of Powers characters before him, Stone responds to an enigma by doing research. 1 5 0 B U R N Y He trawls through the Internet, where a di√erent kind of crowding has produced an endless online reservoir – ‘‘in the world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities’’ – while he continues to search through...