Tom LeClair’s review of Orfeo in CS Monitor

Tom LeClair’s in-depth review of Orfeo, written for Barnes & Noble, has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor for its January 23, 2014 edition. “Orfeo: A retired music professor on the run from the government confronts his past in Richard Powers’s profound yet accessible 11th novel.”

Of novelists in Powers’s generation with whom he is often compared – Franzen, Vollmann, Wallace – none equals Powers’s combination of consistent production, intellectual range, formal ingenuity, and emotional effect. … Put simply, Powers knows more than other novelists of his generation and knows how to use his prodigious expertise to place substantial, thoughtful characters in “the intricate, ingenious forms”….