PEARL K. BELL
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Goldberg Variations, hence the insufferably cute title), human heredity,
minor Flemish landscape painters, and - oh, yes, lest we forget - two
love stories intertwined in a double helix of erudition and desire. Some
of this is undeniably dazzling, most of it much more than even an
uncommon reader can want to absorb.
Since this is a review of fiction, perhaps it's best to concentrate on
the stories and let the encyclopedic clouds of specialized information drift
where they may. The two love stories are separated by thirty years. In
one, Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young microbiologist at a Midwestern
university, sets out in 1957 to break the genetic code and is smitten by a
married colleague. They have a passionate affair, but when she refuses to
leave her husband, Ressler abandons his scientific research and spends the
rest of his life in obscurity as a computer technician. Thirty years later a
reference librarian in Brooklyn becomes intrigued with Dr. Ressler, who
works nearby, and she enlists the help of his handsome assistant, a failed
graduate student in art history, in ferreting out the truth about Dr.
Ressler's life, especially the reason why he threw over his Nobel–
promising career as a scientist "when he was at the forefront of great
discovery." Moving back and forth in time, the two stories unfold in a
dizzying multi-layered profusion of puns and allusions and facts, facts,
facts - about poetry and art, science and music, pop culture, and much
more. Because Jan, the librarian, spends her working hours answering
random questions about everything under the sun, we are bombarded by
a relentless £low of miscellaneous information, along with moments of
surprising banality, such as "Science is not about control. It is about
cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder. ... It is about reverence,
not rna tery. "
The novel is full of prodigies, bloated with facts and theories and
apen,:us, yet in the end the characters are little more than abstract ciphers,
enoml0US heads on recalcitrant bodies. (Ressler's desire for his beloved,
we are told, "awakes the possibilities buried in his cytoplasm. ") There is
something hermetic and airless about this monstrously cerebral tome.
Despite the novel 's erudite abundance, Powers conveys no sense of a
world beyond the catacomb he has so artfully constructed out of science,
computers and music. Though we are given many dates, the book lacks
any
sense of history, of the time in which all this is going on. Nor do
we ever get a clear resolution of the mystery in Ressler's life. This writer's
brilliance, in the end, serves little purpose beyond his irrepressible
exhibitionism.
Moving from the coruscating heights of Richard Powers's sophisti–
cated imagination to Peter Carey's Australian suburb in
The Tax Inspector
involves a dizzying fall: from very high culture to a grungy low. The
Catchprice family, driving its moribund car dealership outside Sydney
