The Game's Afoot Powers has told a family story that is a fun if challenging read. I liked this better than his "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance". I felt I could understand the characters better in "Prisoner's Dilemma".
I am reminded of Hesse's "Glass Bead Game" - take two unrelated topics and find a relationship. Then find a relationship between that and another topic.
You may have to like puzzles and wordplay to truly enjoy this book. I highly recommend it.
Enjoyed it but didn't get it Strangely, although I very much enjoyed this book I don't feel like I got much out of it. Richard Powers' intelligence, imagination, and wonderful prose shine throughout, but I'll freely confess that I just don't "get it". The author was aiming very high but despite lots of moments where something profound seems just about ready to burst forth, in most cases unfortunately it never materializes. For example, each kid wrestles with "solving" dad's puzzle of the prisoner's dilemma. Near the end Artie finally has it... or at least I think he got it but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it was. Or why solving it did him any good. With the exception of dear old mom Ailene, the characters are interesting and well-developed, though in places less than believable. I get the feeling I'm supposed to admire sister Rach's pluck and razor sharp wit but instead she comes across as one of the most annoying people I thank god have never actually met. And having myself been in high school in the late 1970's I can categorically state that at least in my neck of the woods no one ever walked their girl home singing a "Buffalo Gals" duet and lived to tell about it.
The bottom line for me was that this book promised more than it delivered. The story strives to be profound but moments of true revelation are very rare. The book tries to be clever but it's really just the author not letting you in on a secret. The story is replete with humorous lines but only a few made me laugh. When I was much younger and read a book that I just didn't get I attributed it to my own ignorance. Though that's certainly a possibility here, as a now older and somewhat wiser reader who has successfully navigated many challenging novels I'm much less willing to give authors the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he just didn't get the idea across.
Still, I definitely recommend this book. It's wonderful to read prose this well crafted. Powers is intelligent and ambitious and, perhaps best of all, sincere.Good Writer, Story Tough to Follow I recently finished reading Powers' first novel, "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance", and liked it enough that I decided to try some of his other work.
Prisoners' Dilemma is a very complex novel. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I felt that the characters were the book's main strength - they are rich, conflicted and masterfully crafted. However, especially toward the end, I got totally lost. I could not follow the story.
The first 100 pages or so were engaging and interesting, but the novel kept getting stranger, until at the end I was no longer sure what was going on. It could be that I am not as sophisticated a reader as I should be, but if you are like me, be aware that this book is a tough one to follow.
Powers can craft a masterful sentence, and his prose is really great. My problem was that all this great prose never turns into a great story, for me at least.Not for all tastes It's rare that I truly despise a novel, but that's the case with Prisoner's Dilemma. Powers is so steeped in the intellectual tenets of his "novel of ideas" that he seems to have had no time to spare for things like character and plot development. The result is pretension babble uttered by a collection of stick figures.We Must TRUST One Another Or Die. There is no better way to sum up this novel than to steal from W.H. Auden. The first time through this book, I knew there was a wealth of power and beauty hiding underneath it. Perhaps this is a novel that you have to read at a vulnerable time. Perhaps events such as September 11th compel me to say to those of you who will read this review in the future "Read this book to someone you love and weep with them for the world we now inhabit. We have relinquished our own ability to see the magic inherent in the world." If, during the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus deigned to respond to the questioner, this is perhaps what he would have said. It is a novel that attempts to free us from the gated enclaves of the suburbs, the fear and nightmare of double deadbolts, the paranoia of opening mail. Eddie Hobson, Sr. is a man who feels that he must take on the burden of everyone else's mistrust, no matter the personal consequences. He is reduced to speaking in symbols, the better to convey all the aching meaning he feels for his family and the world. He, who is the least physically able, warps his entire family to his side, forcing them to relive his transformation from naive child of the midwest to one who has seen the Brave New World brought about by anonymous men in secret offices. This novel is multi-layered, complex, and deep in ways that make this, IMHO of course, the best explanation of the American Experience since WWII. It's better than Delillo's Underworld by quite a way, and if, you want to escape from the realizations Powers forces upon you, there's always Chapter 11. Everyone's had their own version of Chapter 11, and it is gorgeous. I wanted to call people last night while reading it, just to share the wonder and beauty of it with someone. Fantastic novel, fantastic author, this book chides us with the realization that the only way out of the self-imposed isolation we've managed to hide ourselves in is to fight it every day.
