Book Randomness: Generosity, An Enhancement by Richard Powers

Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

Ferrar, Straus and Giroux

(ARC from Twitter giveaway @FSG_Books) 

Nobody wants to write a dumb review of a smart book.  I finished reading this book several weeks ago, and have been pondering it off and on between other novels, trying to figure out how to talk about it.  To be sure, I really liked it.  It is a richly layered story, dripping with allusion, reaching out through science, literature, philosophy, and pop culture.  It is a book begging to be talked over with clever friends or peers or colleagues, and I have no doubt that it will be.  

Unfortunately, I’ve had neither the time nor the focus to put my thoughts together into a coherent communication about this book.  What follows are some of the ideas that wandered through my brain as I read and then pondered the book (as collected in margins and a notebook).  All of this will likely make more sense after you’ve read the book, which will be released on September 29.  Let me know what you think after you’ve read it.  

I’ve grouped Spoilery comments after some space at the end, for those who’d prefer to avoid hints at the ending. 

I wrote all of these things before I found Oprah’s Reading Questions for the book, but if you read those, you’ll see some overlap.

As an aside, I came across an article about genetic enhancement last week that points to the relevance of the discussion about what we can and should do to ourselves in this genetic age.  

Begin pondering:

My first try at a review

I’m stuck on the word ‘enhancement.’  This book isn’t tagged as a ‘novel’ or ‘allegory,’ though it could certainly bear either of those tags.  No, it is ‘An Enhancement’ right there on the cover.  National Book Award Winner Richard Powers builds a rich, realistic, and complicated world in which enhancements or the search for them pop out around every corner.   Aside from the sexually suggestive use of the term, the implication here is to make something appear bigger or better, or perhaps to make it more attractive.  Revision for improvement by augmenting or trussing.  Here Powers ponders the evolutionary necessity for misery, giving us a story in which he explores an outlier for happiness, a woman who experiences the world with extreme joy and generosity and who is unaffected by even minor malaise.  This Miss Generosity is juxtaposed to a writer who’s own struggle with depression has made him unable to write.  

Devolving into lists

Definitions

—What is Creative Nonfiction?

—Unlike other novels that bear the stamp of “Novel” on the cover, this one is branded “An enhancement.”  What’s the difference?  

 Themes  

—The inside and the outside, the public and the private, the popular and the academic, the phenotype vs. the genotype.

—Fiction is redemptive.  In fiction we can fantasize and revise and enhance.  This is iterated in the genomics of the novel, wherein DNA can be revised.  If the standard story tropes can be fiddled with and recombined, so can the DNA.  Evolution forgets the unviable.

—According to one character in the book, the secret of psychological survival is forgetting but this is a book of remembrance and revision.  

—Russell is a writer frozen by the destruction he has wrought with his pen.

—Human beings? Americans? can’t accept things for what they are.  We must understand what they are and how they work, to dissect and thereby destroy.  

 Complications and Observations

—Provocative, yes; playful, no.

—People self-medicate in many ways: drugs, sex, video games, food.

—We are constantly seeking drugs to heal our misery, but how viable is a life without misery? And what type of life would that be?

—Thassa is like The Giving Tree.  She is referenced in so many different ways, nicknames, first name, last name, full name, epithet. 

—Thassa or Candace are revisions of Grace, givers instead of takers.

—Allegory: Miss Generosity/Happiness (Thassa), Teacherman/Writer (Russell), Counselor/Psychology (Candace), Genetics (Kurton—Curtain?), Popular Media (Oona), Science Media (Tanya), Public, etc. 

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SPOILER comments:

—Thassa tries to kill herself with the drugs that many people need in order to live.

—From the outset, the narrator seems to be conjuring the characters, but at the end it comes across as a revised remembrance. 

—Russell is able to write again, this time not destroying his subject with the words, but rather trying to restore her after she has been otherwise destroyed.  

—Russell struggles with his own misery, but also unwilling to let it go and unable to trust someone without misery.

—Or… Spock tries to rape Thassa, but the narrator does rape her, and only then can Russell accept and love her, when she is broken like he is.