Richard Powers appears in “Influenced By: A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers,” featured in The Believer, February 6, 2015, by Jaimie Clarke. Clarke asked a group of writers “which living, contemporary writers held the most influence of their work.” Weston Cutter cited Richard Powers and offered his thoughts.
Here’s the best way I know to think about the work of Richard Powers—a body of work which stretches over now nearly thirty years and eleven books: while his books are classified as novels they are, all of them, longings, and the longing each novel enacts has to do with how we connect with and apprehend anything like meaning in the world. … This is the object of the longing throughout all Powers’s books: some way to solve for the mystery of being alive, for the glory and horror and awe of existence. ….
Orfeo is one of Harvey Freedenberg’s favorite books of 2014, Harrisburg Magazine, January, 2015.
Orfeo is that rare novel truly deserving of the label “lyrical.” This is an ambitious work of broad scope and big ideas, a profound story whose delights are many and lasting.
Orfeo is reviewed in Deccan Herald by Sundarshan Purohit, “A Life in Music,” February 1, 2015.
Orfeo is a powerful, intricate story that plays out entirely through the mind of its lead character. As much as the story itself, the language and the vocabulary give it its distinctive flavour.
Orfeo is cited in Nicholas Dames’s article on music and fiction in The New Yorker, January 27, 2015.
The protagonist of Richard Powers’s 2014 novel, “Orfeo,” is a composer named Peter Els who, late in life, begins to dabble in biotechnology. Els’s attempts to “compose” in DNA turn him into a suspected bioterrorist fleeing across the country; one of his furtive stops is Champaign, Illinois, where he attended graduate school. In a coffee shop that he remembers from his student days, Els recognizes Steve Reich’s 1995 “Proverb” coming from the speakers. In the bravura passage that follows, Powers describes the way that Els listens to the music:
Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.
In the long tradition of novels about music and musicians, this language is new….
ΦBK, the national academic honor society, has named Orfeo as one of its Top 14 Books of 2014.
Readers with in-depth knowledge of music theory and history, as well as those with only a casual interest, will surely find much to admire about this novel. In Orfeo, Powers has created a work that functions as a testament to the beauty and power of great fiction as well as great music.
This profound, intelligent, and moving story of a man’s retrospective on his ambition, love of music, and failures at love is stretched over the taught frame of a plot driven, seemingly improbably, by bioterrorism accusations and the omniscience of a police state. If that sounds like a lot to cram into one novel, it is — and Powers succeeds at every stroke.
“Best of 2014: 100 recommended books,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 2014.
Powers’ latest novel, one of his finest yet, tells the story of an avant-garde composer who government authorities fear might be a bioterrorist. It’s science fiction that prefers the science to the fiction.