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Powers’ prose is easy to read, but the density of ideas
packed into each page demands frequent pauses to
digest what is being said. Whereas most novels take
a central premise and string it out over a couple of
hundred pages, it feels as if Plowing The Dark only just
keeps the lid on its own complexity.
Like Pynchon and Delillo who are namechecked
as Powers’ peers by several reviewers on Plowing’s
book covers, Powers’ prose has a certain cool authorial,
distinctly American, detachment to it. This in turn
gives the effect of looking at his characters through a
microscope rather than moving amongst them – even
the Taipur Martin narrative, which uses the second
person throughout, seems strangely removed even as it
provides an exhausting empathy with the horror of being
held hostage. This detachment also provides a more
subtle sadness for Adie Karpol, where life is nothing
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
but work and making love is without real thought for
one’s lover. Some of Powers’ sentences on the emotional
lives of Karpol and her friends seem almost like
asides and yet always hint at a melancholy for those
characters, a fundamental loneliness and an absence of
happiness with no idea of where to look for it. These
moments in the book are perhaps all the more noticeable
for being moments of emotional vulnerability or
longing amongst so much intellectual abstraction.
Plowing The Dark, then, is unashamedly intellectual
and decidedly demanding of its reader, a near riot of
ideas and imagination that crackles with the electricity
of new thoughts emerging from the old. It feels like
a third millennium novel – synthesising and distilling
histories of events, of ideas and of people, reshaping
and retracing new threads through them, cutting its
own furlong for what a novel should do. �
407
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