The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers

Jeffrey J. Williams The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers Jeffrey Williams: First I want to ask about personal background. Where did you grow up? I know that you lived in Thailand for a while; that's certainly remarkable. Richard Powers: I was born in Evanston, Illinois and grew up on the north side of Chicago, in a suburb called Lincolnwood. My father was a school principal there. When I was eleven, he took a job with the International School of Bangkok and brought his five children halfway around the world. I spent my teenage years there, returning to the United States to finish high school. The change in trajectory was incredibly formative for me, going from the suburban Midwest to Southeast Asia at a time when I was still capable of instantly picking up the language and immersing myself in Thai culture. JW: What years were you in Thailand? RP: The late 60s and early 70s, from the age of eleven to sixteen. JW: So that was during the Vietnam War era? RP: At the height. Bangkok was transformed by the American presence in Southeast Asia. The city was a capital for American servicemen on R & R. Thailand had become dependent on the war's commercial spillover. JW: The so-called "night market." Do you think that that experience gave you a political sense? It must have made you see America's role in the world differently than if you had stayed in Evanston. RP: I think it did. My father came from the south side of Chicago, a working class guy with already something ofa political orientation, and theway he raised his children encouraged us to suspect received wisdom. Being in so different a culture at so formative an age confirmed my sense of distance from the life I might have otherwise lived. JW: So you came back to the states roughly in 1974, to the University of Illinois? 96 the minnesota review RP: That's right. When I graduated from high school upstate, I came down to start college in Champaign and wound up taking a Bachelor 's and a Master 's degree here. JW: To keep track of a timeline, that was the late 70s. I've gotten the sense from your novels as well as a few of the things I've read about you that you thought of being a physicist. On the other hand you took literature courses, and in Galatea 2.2, you describe an influential literature teacher. I don't know if that's biographical or not, but what made you turn from science to literature? RP: I was the kind of kid who really didn't make great distinctions between different fields and who took huge amounts of pleasure in being able to solve problems in very different intellectual disciplines. If anything, I would say my problem-solving abilities in math and science were always a good deal stronger than my verbal skills. I always thought that I would end up becoming one kind of scientist or another. It wasn't always physics. For a while it was oceanography . For a while it was paleontology. JW: Unusual for a novelist . . . RP: Well, I'm not sure what the usual novelist trajectory is! But my orientation was definitely empirical, a real bias toward the "nonsubjective " disciplines. I guess the difficulty for me growing up was this constant sensation that every decision to commit myself more deeply to any of these fields meant closing several doors. Specializing involved almost perpetual leave-taking from other pursuits that I loved and that gave me great pleasure. I really resisted the process, as long as I could. I just wanted to arrive somewhere where I could be the last generalist and do that in good faith. I thought for a long time that physics might be that place. We have this notion ofphysics—especially cosmology, I guess— as representing a fundamental kind of knowledge, and that it's a great field to be in if you want the aerial view of how things work. In fact, in some ways, almost the opposite may be true. The enormous success of the reductionist program depends upon absolute...