PEARL K. BELL
Fiction Chronicle
THE GOLD-BUG VARIATIONS. By Richard Powers.
William Morrow
and Company.
$25.00.
THE TAX INSPECTOR. By Peter Carey.
Alfred A. Knopf
$21.00.
TIME'S ARROW. By Martin Amis.
Harmony.
$18.00.
TALKING IT OVER. By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf.
$21.00.
IDGH COTTON. By Darryl Pinckney.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$21.00.
MATING. By Norman Rush.
Alfred A. Knopf
$23.00.
OUTERBRIDGE REACH. By Robert Stone.
Ticknor
&
Fields.
$21.95.
One of the tiresome cliches about the state of contemporary fiction
claims that publishers fill their lists either with blockbuster trash or with
politically correct novels about race, gender, homosexuality, and so on,
and that any work of genuine literary merit must necessarily fall through
the cracks. Yet even a casual browse through recently published fiction
refutes this sweeping indictment. As in any season, the novels that have
recently appeared range from the sublime to the pedestrian, and worse,
with an astonishing variety of imaginative work in between. And if this
column may seem to be making a statement because it deals only with
the work of Live Male Writers, the choice has to do with the particular
interest aroused by seven very different 'novels.
It
has nothing to do with
ideology.
One can't help wondering what readers - other than editors and
reviewers lashed to the mast of duty - Richard Powers had in mind when
he embarked on his inordinately complicated and exhausting third novel,
The Cold Bug Variations.
Surely not "the common reader," if such a
creature still exists. Powers is a very clever fellow, highly acclaimed these
days, a thirty-four-year-old polymath, the winner of a MacArthur
"genius" fellowship, who was trained as a physicist but gave up science
for literature. On closer examination he hasn't given up science at all,
just put it to a different use. Very long, densely packed stretches of the
novel are devoted to the intricacies of genetic research, complete with
charts and tables and diagrams and codes and equations that only a
scientist in the field might even begin to comprehend. In addition, Pow–
ers is intent on instructing us at closely detailed length about computer
programming, the subtle connections between music and molecular bi–
ology (drawn from Glenn Gould's original recording of the
