I have always enjoyed the novels of Richard Powers (I have read them all), and I was eager to read his latest because it is about a fictional composer in the second half of the 20th century. One of my cardinal rules for films and novels is to never read any books or see any films with composers or artists in them; they always get it wrong. I have to say that Powers pretty much gets it right. (Jean Echenoz's novel "Ravel" is also excellent.) Never have I read any novelist who comes so close to illuminating a possible state of mind of the composer.
Powers' novel is a biographical portrait of a composer who emerges in the 1950's, and in the course of his compositional life encounters many of the aesthetic trends and battles that have influenced the course of late 20th century music. Total serialism, the revolutions of John Cage, minimalism, neo-romanticsm, etc. take their turns in unsettling the mind of the protagonist; who, from his origins as a somewhat naive child prodigy succumbs repeatedly to the demands of each new aesthetic. (The professors of University of Illinois, that "Darmstadt-on-the Prairies", are portrayed as especially brutal.)
As with virtually all of Powers' novels, there are multiple simultaneous strands of narrative. In this case, he alternates between the narrative of composer's present day existence as a wanted biological terrorist and the narrative of his life. There is a third strand, which turns out to be tweets. How does a composer become a wanted biological terrorist? By pursuing a project very similar to that of the Canadian poet Christian Bök, who has spent the last ten years trying to encode a poem into DNA. (Google to find out details..)
Powers has a sentimental side which I don't always appreciate; he is after an apotheosis, which I admire, but which doesn't always resonate with me. His composer's artistic soul resonates most closely with Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time", as I believe Power's must as well. One of the most moving sections of the book is a whole chapter on the origins and performance of the "Quartet...".
One striking feature of the book is a number of very detailed narrative descriptions of specific pieces of music, such as Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time" and Reich's "Proverbs" While these descriptions (which go on for a number pages) are both accurate and evocative, I am not really sure what to make of them. Are they meant to recall the music one has already heard, or to give the reader a facsimile of the experience of actually hearing the music? But this problem is endemic to the application of prose to music, in any case.
I don't really know how this novel would resonate with a reader who is not well versed in the history of late 20th century music. Perhaps it would provoke he or she to seek out some of the music described. But, in any case, the book makes for fascinating reading.
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