Jim Holt has a review today of the latest Richard Powers
novel:
Back in Princeton, back in the day, I read one of the
earlier works by that author, who had a reputation for braininess. A brainy novel is not necessarily
any good, but I had greatly enjoyed The Mind-Body Problem, by the
philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, and wrote to our local municipal reference
librarian thus:
> I just finished reading
Richard Powers' "Gold Bug Variations", which you
> would like -- its heroine is a
reference librarian! And its hero
is a
> biochemist. Now, novels that have science
front-and-center (and I mean real
> science, not science fictions)
are comparatively rare.
"Arrowsmith" comes to
> mind, but... can you give me
the names of any other novels that are
> fundamentally about the
practice of science? Thanks.
She replied, delightfully, by return of post:
Here are a few titles that I have
unearthed thus far... I will pass this question
on to other staff members next week
and see what other suggestions turn up. Hope
one or two of these titles will
suit your needs -- a * indicates that we own the
title:
*"Mendel's Dwarf" by
Simon Mawer
*"The Calcutta
Chromosome" by Amitav Ghosh
*"Darwin's Shooter" by Roger
McDonald
Books from a series by
novelist/scientist Carl Djerassi (we have only the first
in the series):
*The Cantor's Dilemma
The Bourbaki Gambit
Menachem's Seed
No
You may also want to have a look at
"Darwin's Ghost" by Steve Jones... it is not
a novel, but it has had great
reviews. It is a reworking and update of "The
Origins of Species" that is by
all accounts infinitely more readable than
Darwin's original.
Oh, and Thanks for the
recommendation of "Gold Bug Variations" -- it sounds like
a great
and I shall add it to my "to
read" list.
Regards,
Janie
After that, I read a couple more by Powers, then gave
up. Something was just
missing. (The Ghosh thing proved
also not worth the effort.)
I never was inspired to write even something as long as thoughtful as
the Holt review; but here are a
couple of notes from back then, FWIW:
"Fielding followed Swift and
Pope in deflating the pride of scientists." (Jones, The Rhetoric of Science,
76.)
For
some reason, science has fared better in poetry – of all places! -- from the
time of Lucretius onwards.
Powers himself brings in Dickens,
referring rather slightingly to "a cheery little Dickens book about the
criminally destitute" (Wandering Soul 272). Dickens never wrote a cheery little book about anything, let
alone the "criminally destitute" (whatever that is exactly). He wrote one mostly cheery big book,
whose animal spirits skillfully distract the reader from quite taking in the
sharpness of the underlying satire; but after Pickwick Papers he really wrote no book that could be called either
cheery or little. His reputation
for superficial joviality must be based largely on half-remembered inexpert or
sugared stagings (in school auditoria, isn't junior adorable) of "A
Christmas Carol", which even
in its written form is the least
of his works.
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