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Avg. Rating: 4
"Attention, please...."
This review shall be relatively brief for the uncomplicated reason that I don't enjoy reviewing books that I despise. Thus, it's simply a warning to the unwary reader. This is not a novel. It is not a story. The writing is terrible, clunky and so tendentious one wants to feed it to one's dog, or the nearest dog one chances upon after reading it. Other reviewers here warn "simple-minded" readers away if they expect a page-turner or a plot-driven narrative. I would warn the reader away who is in search of deep themes or moving, poetic language. This book has neither. What this book does have is crackpot riffs on great ideas that the author clearly only partially understands. Thus, readers who prefer lecture halls to books might just take to this work, but I'm chary of recommending it even to them. You have to fancy lecturers who are undiluted cranks and spout bubblegum philosophy, history and science, I should say, to appreciate this particular lecture.
What particularly rankled this particular reader was Powers's attempt to appropriate Proust, whom he clearly does not understand. Powers quotes Proust before the book even begins. He quotes him again and again. He cites him numerous times. But he has, sadly, missed Proust's most basic insights. The term "involuntary memory" that Powers uses here and is frequently used in reference to Proust was never used by Proust himself. The experience is much deeper than any term can even begin to convey. The narrator is at Mrs. Shreck's when he attempts to create a Proustian moment for himself:
"I thought that I knew this smell from somewhere in the past, and I tried for a moment to place it. But I soon realized the truth: the smell itself was the memory, and I was anthologizing it and sending it to the future."
No! This is precisely what you cannot do. You don't have that sort of control over life, over yourself, over your memories. You simply don't have that sort of gimcrack X-Files power. Nobody does, even Powers. You can't "send things into the future." To do so, to paraphrase Hamlet, is to pluck out their mystery and leave them impotent. For Proust, it's precisely those smells and stimuli that DO NOT register at all with you when they occur that bring back lost worlds when you mysteriously encounter them years later.
Ah well, maybe this "insight" is more your thing:
"But one might as well say that no one ever got hurt jumping from a tall building until hitting the pavement."
This notion is used to bolster Powers's heavy-handed argument that forces as strong as gravity caused WWI to happen when it did.
Are you taking notes? Good. And do make sure you fully understand the simple mathematics of compound interest, or you'll be harshly ejected from Powers's lecture hall if you still insist on attending.
Treatise on the Age of Mechanical reproduction
I really had to force myself through the opening 20 pages to attune to the various narratives. I like the book without being enraptured, and, like other reviewers granting this as Power's initial outing as well as my relationship to his work, I'd pursue his ouvre. If nothing else, he has a firm grip on the cultural development since the First WW. And I, at least, hadn't linked Henry Ford, the Futurists, Sandler, Deigo Rivera, and cultural theorist, Walter Benjamen etc in such a beguiling chain. And I like those connexions! The academic quality of Power's research into the writings and biographies of the aforementioned are the attraction here. I felt like I was getting a more punchy, poetic, review of Barthe's, Camera Lucida, Rudolph Arnheim's,writing on visual perception but with a similar broad reach of Rebecca Solnit's wonderful book on Muybridge, River of Dreams. In fact, the treatise aspect of the book outweighs the fictional meta-narratives, but this is not a deterrance given the food on offer. Readers might look at Tasmanian ex-pat, Peter Conrad's, Modern Places: Modern Times for similar summations.
Good 1st novel
Witty but complex. Spend some time early on getting a handle on the characters because the book jumps from one to another - a lot. You can read the Amazon description for the details. The male characters run the gamut of personality types (I won't spoil it by describing them). Some you will like; some you won't. Each plays a key part in the development of the story.
This is the first of Power's books I have read and I will be going after more. If, as other reviewers have indicated, the others show Power's growth from this first novel, I am looking forward to several good reads.
More educational than engrossing
I like Richard Powers, in fact, I'd rate his "Galatea 2.2" as one of my top ten novels of all time.
But "Three Farmers" (which I read _after_ "Galatea" and "The Goldbug Variations" and "Gain") was a bit of a let down. Sure, it had all the intellectual stimulation that I expected. And yes, it had some great quotes (both from Powers and from others that he cites ... such as "The world has changed less since the death of Jesus than it has in the past 30 years").
What went wrong? Maybe I was just not in the mood. Maybe it was the lack of a compelling love interest (so powerful in his other novels). Maybe it was that his historical lectures (on Ford, WW I, Sarah Berndhart, and photography) were a bit too pedantic.
But what really bothered me was the gimmicky ending: in the final two pages, one of the protagonists (who is on the verge of continuing a relationship with a female character) abruptly stops and asks (the reader? the author?) "So does he [I] get the girl?" ... and he walks out of her life forever. Huh?
Okay, so Powers has just finished a lecture on how (in photography, at least) there is a fascinating relationship between photographer, subject, and viewer. They fulfill each other, they create each other, they cannot exist without each other. I get it: this same relationship exists between author, characters, and reader. But to take a 350 page narrative and have it end on this cheesy metaphysical note .. a bit of a let down. I'm not even sure what is happening: is the character stepping out of the novel and into the readers reality? If this is so important to Powers, why not at least develop it for a few pages rather than tack it on in the last page?
This device reminds me of Pirandello's "Seven Characters in Search of an Author" ... but in that case it was a successful device because it was clear what was happening, and gave the audience something to chew on.
Try one of Power's other books.
An audacious novel
Mr Powers begins his novel by following a narrator travelling by train from Chicago to Boston. He has to change trains in Detroit and since he has several hours at his leisure, he decides to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts. There, he is puzzled by a photograph taken by Augustus Sander in 1914 showing three farmers on their way to a dance. The reader follows the narrator's progress as he tries to find answers to the questions that preoccupy him about the photograph: who took it, why was it taken, who are the three farmers appearing in the picture.
On another level, Mr Powers gives a fictional account - or it may also be the result of the narrator's research, it is not explicit in the text - of the action taking place at the time the photograph was taken and also what happens subsequently. And so the reader gets to know the three farmers Hubert, Peter and Adolphe.
Yet on another level, the author introduces various contemporary characters working in the Powell Building for a magazine called "Micro Monthly News": Mays, Moseley, Delaney. After having at first the impression that the events at this level are unrelated to the two other levels, the reader soon realises that there is a connection indeed.
What makes Mr Powers's novel interesting are his many reflections on various topics. These range from the situation of a small Belgian village called Petit Roi during the First World War, the part that Henry Ford played in that war, various personalities like Darwin, Freud, Gödel, Planck or Sarah Bernhardt, to the Industrial Revolution and the changes that mechanisation brought to our civilisation. And because the main protagonist so to speak of the novel is a photograph, Mr Powers also deals in detail in the history of photography.
A very instructive novel, plenty of interesting points of view that show Mr Powers's broad knowledge.
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