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Too dumb for The Gold Bug Variations I am clearly too stupid to understand Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations: about 60 pages in, I'm still almost completely lost amidst the bizarre, elliptical, article-shunning style that Powers adopts, not to mention the sentences filled with pretty words and little sense. One particularly choice selection: His peace turns to a sadness so overpowering that, before he can interpret it, tears seep out his eyes on underground springs. Avuncular defective lachrymal, until this moment happily masked, flushed by the deep voice, the simplicity of the tune, the hopeless hope of words in a world where the stadium colonnade declares itself a safe radiation haven, or just this absolute, still, summer night in a featureless town. Spontaneous twitch of gland for a race capable of grabbing the next rung while simultaneously leaping for the beloved brink. Or purely somatic epiphenomenon: Robeson hits a note, springs a chord sequence that triggers solute; everything else lies outside measure. (pp. 51-52)It's not that this passage (and others like it) doesn't make sense; it's just so damnably abstruse that reading through Powers's book is like slogging through molasses. And it also feels a little too self-consciously brilliant: watch me play with words, Powers seems to say, and see how I can make them do things you never thought possible with 26 letters, punctuation, and a space. I've never liked beautiful writing for its own sake. Flashy prose, even with something to back it up, is a distraction, a waste of time that could be better spent on authors who lavished more effort on the substance than the style. That's why I've always preferred Hemingway to Faulkner, Carver to Brodkey, Dubliners to Ulysses. As yet, nothing in Powers's book promises that it will evolve into anything more meaningful than a clever play on words and ideas, but I'll probably persevere until the end nonetheless. |
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