Book review: Generosity

Published on Sunday 10 January 2010 10:50

GENEROSITY Richard Powers Atlantic, £16.99

RICHARD Powers' witty and cerebral fictions seem to keep just ahead of the impending cusp of reality. His new novel, Generosity, addresses a question that writers as great as Samuel Richardson and as dire as Paulo Coelho have tried and failed to answer: how do you write about happiness?

Russell Stone is a writer whose early success was so traumatic he now limits himself to teaching creative writing and editing a "user-generated" self-help magazine. Into his class breezes Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian refugee whose tragic life story seems radically at odds with her aura of utter joyfulness.

Stone consults the campus therapist over his suspicion Thassadit suffers from hyperthymia; a pathological happiness, like manic depression without the depression. This brings them all into the orbit of genetics pioneer, Thomas Kurton, who is convinced Thassadit might be the key to manipulating misery out of the human genome.

The whole scenario is told by a non-omniscient narrator, a nameless, wry, slightly aloof figure whose digressions and witty asides add a further layer of irony to this maze of mirrors and mirages. This raised-eyebrow style, peppered with quotably smart lines, prevents the debates on nature versus nurture, free will versus destiny and the relevant virtues of the "humanities" versus "human science" becoming formulaic or preachy.

The almost arch, self-conscious style is not an affectation; rather it allows Powers to move, cunningly, the authorial focus and suggest parallels between the novelist, the characters and the themes.

Like Kurton, he tinkers with the fabric of their personalities. Like Thassadit, he can stop and marvel at seemingly mundane events. Like Stone, he wonders whether the "novel" is an outdated means of understanding humanity, which at one point turns into a sterling defence of Powers' kind of fiction: "Realism – that whole threadbare patch job of consoling conventions – is like one of those painkillers that gets you addicted without helping anything. In reality, a million things happen all at once for no good reason, until some idiot texting on his cell ploughs into you on the expressway in northern Indiana. The End. Not exactly The Great Gatsby. Sales: zip. Critical reception: total bewilderment. A failed avant-garde experiment. Not even a decent allegory."

Generosity is not just an intelligent embodiment of ideas, or a fun, sassy read. It's the kind of novel that breaks the novel to rebuild it for our times.

This article was first published in Scotsman on Sunday on 10 January, 2010.