The Art of Fiction No. 175

“Richard Powers: The Art of Fiction No. 175,” by Kevin Berger, appeared in The Paris Review, Winter 2002-2003, No. 164.

“The following interview is the product of several meetings and conversations. The first came in the spring of 1998, when he was working on Plowing the Dark and living in a garage apartment near Stony Brook, Long Island. The conversation took place in a café; Powers arrived on a mountain bike with a quaint metal basket; at the time, he had never owned a car. The next interview unfolded during the following summer and stretched over two days at Powers’s small house in Urbana, surrounded by flowers, located on a leafy, tree-lined lane. Then, in December 2002, Powers talked on the phone from Urbana aboutThe Time of Our Singing. While writing it, he said, something “so unexpectedly lucky happened at such a relatively late period in life” that he was able to tap a “new sense of stamina and sufficiency, of patience and confidence” to finish the book: he got married for the first time.”