Plowing the Dark

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Plowing the Dark

It might seem odd to remark upon a novelist's intelligence, but after reading the work of Richard Powers it's impossible not to. Gain delved into the inner workings of American capitalism while Operation Wandering Soul used the Pied Piper myth as a central metaphor in a story about human creation. Powers's seventh novel, Plowing the Dark, is no less ambitious. Using two separate narratives and more techno-babble than a Philip K. Dick tale, it explores the optimism and deadly hubris of imagination.

At the center of this tale is Adie Karpol, a painter living in New York City's SoHo district in 1986 (ostensibly, before rents ballooned). For reasons both personal and economic, Adie has given up on art to freelance as a graphic designer. As the novel begins, a friend from Adie's bohemian college days calls in the middle of the night to beg her to join his budding virtual reality project in Seattle. "Just come see this thing, before you die," he pleads.

Like many West Coast start-ups, the company Adie visits hums with messianic zeal. The project is an empty room called the Cavern that, with the help of five massive computers running futuristic software, can become anything—a Byzantine cathedral, a famous painting, or even the deepest African jungle. The software firm that foots the bill (as an R & D write-off) has assembled world-class economists, mathematicians, and biologists to perfect its systems, yet without a graphics expert on board, the Cavern's virtual reality looks like the work of a third-grader. After taking the room for a spin, Adie—once a skeptical New Yorker—decides to join the project.

Only Neal Stephenson and David Foster Wallace have written this well about the intoxicating power and fictional possibilities of computer-based technology. Reading about liquid crystal imaging techniques, subroutines, and coding languages makes you want to stop and give someone a high-five. The energy of Powers's prose is that infectious.

Just as the novel threatens to overwhelm the lay reader with its barrage of techy language, the story skips to Beirut, where a young American named Taimur Martin has come to teach English. The mid-'80s were an inauspicious time for Americans to live and work in the Middle East, even those with an Iranian name. Within a week, Taimur is abducted, blindfolded, shoved into a car, and driven to the outskirts of town where he spends his days bound and shackled in total darkness with no human contact.

The jump from Seattle to Beirut is initially disorienting, but Powers's strategy works. Adie and Taimur's stories become metaphorically bound together. While Adie works through the night to light up the walls of the Cavern with splashy computer-generated images, Taimur wrestles with his own imagination, trying to to prevent himself from sliding into madness. By juxtaposing these two plots, Powers shows that no matter what we are wired into—computer hardware or the wetware of our own brains—imagination can be both our salvation and our destruction.

Powers adds a further twist to his study of imagination when Adie discovers that the Cavern is part of a project she cannot in good conscience continue to support. Do we need to put a limit on what we can imagine? How much is enough? And why do we as human beings continue to lend our imaginations to the powers of destruction? Through Powers's keen eye, we see the truth in one character's statement that "[e]very new machine—every line of code that we write—changes what we think of as realistic."

Plowing the Dark is unafraid to ask the big questions about what roles science, art, and technology should play in our lives. But it also celebrates the way technology can liberate some people from loneliness, showing how, even in an environment as sterile and cold as the Cavern, people need to tell each other their dreams. By channeling these stories into a narrative about the essential issues of modern life, Richard Powers has given us his boldest work yet.

—John Freeman

About the Author

Richard Powers is the author of seven novels, including The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, and, most recently, Gain, which won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction.

From the Publisher

"Superb . . . Powers pulls off one of the most astonishing feats I've ever seen in literature . . . daring, unpredictable, and emotionally powerful."—Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World

"A fiercely visual book . . . the effect is spectacular . . . The most visceral prose Powers has ever written."—Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review

"America's most ambitious novelist . . . Plowing The Dark is virtual reality composed in a language that will never go obsolete. No one who becomes immersed in its poetry will walk out the way he or she came in."—Kevin Berger, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Plowing The Dark may be [Powers's] most finely executed story yet . . . Relentless and mesmerizing . . . a beautiful homage to the sine qua non of consciousness itself . . . the final triumph of art over pain."—Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"Powers has an inventive, virtuosic writing style that reserves him a special category in today's fiction . . . I don't have the space to do justice to all the wonders of craftsmanship in Plowing The Dark . . . This is the first emblematic novel of the 21st century, a lesson and an inspiration."—Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times

"[A] tour de force. It has overwhelming inventiveness and fun moments as well."—Donald Newlove, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is, ultimately, a novel of ideas, but one with a soul . . . There is much to admire in this novel, particularly the ingenious way in which reality is captured."—Scott Leibs, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Full of intelligence, exacting analysis and supple prose . . . [a] magisterial storybook."—Corey Mesler, The Commercial Appeal

"Powers' twin tales are rife with echoes and allusions that reinforce their shared concern with the ways in which we reinvent our worlds."—Ralph Rugoff, LA Weekly

"Superb . . . perhaps [Powers'] greatest novel . . . Nearly every page of Powers' astonishing book has stunning ideas that will force you to re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about these subjects, and the implications you never imagined."—Steven Moore, The Newark Star-Ledger

"Powers displays his trademark intellectual richness . . . His prose makes technology sing and music compute."—Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times

Trey Strecker

A spectacular book, brimming with profound ideas and intense emotions, Plowing the Dark bridges art and science, imagination and reality, knowledge and feeling to create an intricate work of human artistry that is moving and instructive.
— American Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A groundbreaking literary novelist and MacArthur "genius" grant winner, Powers (Galatea 2.2; Gain; The Gold Bug Variations) takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art in his ambitious and dazzling seventh book. Like most of Powers's previous works, this novel weaves together two sets of characters. One comprises artists and programmers at the Cavern, a pioneering virtual-reality project sponsored by a Microsoftesque company. As college students in the early 1970s, painter Adie Klarpol, writer Steve Spiegel and composer Ted Zimmerman shared a house, an art scene, a complex erotic entanglement and a sense of limitless potential. When the novel opens, it's the mid-'80s, and Steve is a programmer: he convinces Adie to flee New York City and commercial art for Washington State and the Cavern. We follow Adie as she learns about new media and about her new, multiethnic colleagues, each with his or her own emotional problems. As Adie and Steve rediscover high art and each other, both must return to the charismatic Ted and his painful fate. Powers's other plot concerns Taimur Martin, an American teacher taken hostage in Beirut. Taimur spends most of the novel in captivity, thrown back on memory and imagination: his harrowing second-person narration transforms outward monotony into inward drama, building up to some of Powers's best writing to date. Powers's fans love his gorgeous, allusive (if sometimes florid) prose, and his digressions into the sciences; both features, largely missing from Gain, re-emerge here to spectacular effect. Taimur's life and Adie's link up only thematically--they never meet; instead, Powers's dramatic prose and his intellectual reach makes their symbolic connection more than enough to propel the novel toward its moving close. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Grab your Janson's History of Art and a dictionary and prepare to be taken on one of the great rides of 21st-century fiction. Powers (Gain, Gold Bug Variations) confirms his standing at the forefront of contemporary literature with this, his seventh novel. Here, a disenchanted artist is recruited by a college friend to be part of a brilliant team at work on a virtual reality room, and, in a parallel tale, a half-Persian American ESL teacher in Beirut is taken hostage by Islamic militants. The first story line contains some of the best writing around regarding computers and their implications; the second is a tour de force of empathy. As always with Powers, the reader wonders how the two stories will come together, and, in the course of telling them, Powers tests our fundamental reasons for being. He looks at the ways in which art and religion reflect a basic conflict within human consciousness, exemplified by the Old Testament ban on graven images. In short, Powers asks (and ultimately answers) the question: What is consciousness for? Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/00.]--David Dodd, Marin Cty. Free Lib., San Rafael, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Talk Magazine

A masterful novel about a despondent English teacher, religious extremists, and cyberengineers.

Mark Levine

The book is better than brilliant. It is a demonstration of vast intelligence in the service of human need. Powers has been to cyberspace and discovered that the old-fashioned novel, bound in its sheaf of print-splattered paper, is among the most resilient interactive events of all.
— Men's Journal

Sandy Asirvatham

Powers once again lays bare a terrible paradox of human existence: namely, that our imaginations, the very faculties that allow us to escape reality, also keep us perpetually unsatisfied and enslaved to our longings for a better world. As is true of this beautiful and painful novel, what delights us and what makes us miserable are one and the same.
—Time Out New York

Daniel Zalewski

. . . a novel of brute juxtaposition, a work that cross-cuts between . . . two disparate realms . . . When the two pictures finally do merge, the effect is spectacular.
—The New York Times Book Review